Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative 9781400871483

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Whence the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative
1. Subverting the Father: Some Nineteenth- Century Precursors
Wuthering Heights: Myth and History, Repetition and Alliance
Pierre, or, the Ambiguities: Incest, Indeterminacy and Fragmentation
Ernest Pontifex, or the Way of All Flesh: Self-Begetting, Space, and Forgetfulness
2. "Links in a Chain": Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
3. The Cycle Dance: D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
4. "The Shadowy Attenuation of Time": William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
5. "A Colored Spiral in a Ball of Glass": "Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
6. "Everything is Known": Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Conclusion
Whither the Novel: The Wager on Surface
Notes
Index

Citation preview

TIME AND THE NOVEL

TIME AND THE NOVEL The Genealogical Imperative

PATRICIA DRECHSEL TOBIN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1978 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation This book has been composed in linotype Baskerville Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

for the parents—Ruth and Ken for the brothers—Kenny and Tommy for the children—Shannon, Shaun, Caylyn

Contents

Preface

ix

INTRODUCTION

3

Whence the Novel: T h e Genealogical Imperative

3

1. Subverting the Father: Some Nineteenth-Cen­ tury Precursors Wuthering Heights: Myth and History, Repetition and Alliance Pierre, or, the Ambiguities: Incest, Indeter­ minacy and Fragmentation Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of all Flesh: Self-Begetting, Space, and Forgetfulness 2. "Links in a C h a i n " : Thomas Mann, brooks

η$ 42 46

Bndden-

3. T h e Cycle Dance: D. H. Lawrence, The bow 4.

29

54 Rain­ 81

" T h e Shadowy Attenuation of T i m e " : Wil­ liam Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

107

5. "A Colored Spiral in a Ball of Glass": "Vladi­ mir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chron­ icle

133

6.

"Everything Is Known": Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

164

CONCLUSION

192

Whither

192

the Novel: T h e Wager on Surface

Notes

215

Index

231 VIl

Preface

The retrospective glance that constitutes a preface is especially irresistible to a critic who, having completed her study of the irreversible imperatives within temporal process, is then permitted to reverse the terminals of time and write the book's genesis at its conclusion. This book was born some years ago at the University of Pittsburgh, when I became captive to an overwhelming hunch that the problem of time might provide a key to modern consciousness. Although a graduate student of English studies at the time, I decided on the spot that I had better become a humanist. Thereafter, I made compulsive and unofficial forays upon the timemeditations of psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, aestheticians, historians, and sociologists—only to discover that the fertile chaos of my humanistic treasures refused accommodation to my specific literary interest in the novel. It was not until I stumbled upon Edward Said's phrase, the "dynastic principle of narrative," and realized that his metaphor might be taken literally, that I determined to study time in the novel as it had been construed thematically and structurally in those family chronicle novels that follow a dynastic family through its generations. At the time, the economy of the formulation delighted me: What could be more perfect than the homologous congruity between time-line, family-line, and story-line? Since then, regretting how many salutary, time-obsessed novelists had to be passed over for not having produced the proper novel for my triple equation, I have found that initial delight necessarily tempered. If I persist IX

Preface nevertheless in being grateful for that principle of de­ liberate limitation, it is because it has allowed me to think through a theory of the novel that I believe could never have risen up and extricated itself from my com­ prehensive readings of many individual novels. I am convinced, to the contrary, that like any formal con­ struct, the novel may be fully understood only at a logi­ cal level higher than that of its own making. My own hope is that the insights proceeding from this leaner trajectory of thought may be extended, theoretically if not methodologically, to diverse other novels, with the happy expectation of time's turning up novel truths. To the persevering faculty at the University of Pitts­ burgh who found their way with such superb equa­ nimity through the original five hundred pages (and appended documents), I owe fully as much admiration as gratitude—to Marcia Landy, Julio Matas, the late Charles Crow, and most gratefully to my dissertation di­ rector, Harry J. Mooney, Jr. Since then, I have received valuable comment on individual chapters from my Rut­ gers University colleagues, Dan Howard and Julian Moynahan, and from the historian Jack Diggins of the Uni­ versity of California at Irvine. Nor has institutional sup­ port been less generously forthcoming. I thank the Rut­ gers Research Council for the summer of 1975, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1976-1977 at the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine. That year, coincident with my final ministrations to this volume, began in the feisty intellectual ferment of the summer seminars offered by Hayden White, Rene Girard, Ralph Freedman, and Frank Kermode, and unrolled itself under the steady mentorship of Professor Freedman and Murray Krieger. And finally, my appreciation goes to a quite different χ

Preface helmsman, my colleague Paul Miers, who, through pursuing a most ungenealogical course of "tracing the track and tracking the trace," sustained my more tentative hope that speculative thought might be the joyous province of a community of scholars.

Xl

TIME AND THE NOVEL

INTRODUCTION

Whence the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative

Recent critics who have approached the novel as a formal construct have argued for space, not time, as its organizing principle. In that influential document of the formalist New Criticism, "Spatial Form in the Modern Novel," Joseph Frank notes how Joyce, Woolf, and others have "spatialized" time, halted its flow so that relations might be perceived as juxtaposed in space, thereby forcing us to read their novels, like poems, for the "reflexive reference" within simultaneity. A perceptive critic from a later generation, Sharon Spencer, hails the advent of the "architectonic" novel—written by Fuentes, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Cortazar, and others —which frankly abandons narration in order to simulate a spatial entity analogous to the plastic arts.1 If both critics are especially zealous in securing our appreciation of spatial form, it is because in the past we have found it uncommonly difficult to see any primary formal significance at all in the novel. The view of the novel as a formal construct has been taught to us by our modern novelists, and perhaps also by such critics as Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction and Mark Schorer in "Technique as Discovery." As readers we have found it more "natural" to locate the novel on the side of trueto-life experience, and in the absence of any conspicuous formality, to read it for its reference to the world. Thus for James the novel simulates the "felt sense of life," 3

Introduction for Lawrence it is the "one bright book of life," for George Eliot it represents "the stories life presents us."2 These novelists, of course, have their eyes on the novel prior to its modern and broadly international experiments in dehumanization and abstraction—on the classical novel of the European, and especially English, "great tradition," which reached its culmination in the nineteenth century. This is the novel, I shall argue, that has Time at the center of both its inner process and outer form. In talking about the novel, the time-critic's problem is the inverse of that of the space-critic: not because it is so strange, but because it is so familiar, time resists critical articulation. Time exerts a double pressure on the realistic novel: as form, it is largely silent and unobtrusive, but as process, it is noisy and ubiquitous. We are all ready to concede temporal process, whereby time is the local index to the daily happenings of "life in time," which E. M. Forster assures us the story always narrates. This, we assume too quickly, is what supplies the high degree of referentiality in the traditional novel. But look what temporal process yields: the novelistic character coasting down the river of flux and change, afloat among the fragmented multiplicity of events and the unstable proliferation of details, passing through a random before/after temporal sequence that is ultimately devoid of order and intelligibility. This, we are inclined to say, is not what we meant at all; this description is relevant perhaps only to the primitive disorder of picaresque, surely not to the high order of literary realism. And so we turn to the other half of Forster's formulation, the "life by values" that the plot promotes in counterdistinction to story, and find there the form of Time. We do not think of our lives as an 4

The Genealogical

Imperative

indiscriminate jumble of disjointed events, b u t as a progress through action to knowledge; and at the end of a life, as at the culmination of a novel, we assume that existence has earned some glimpse of its meaning. T h e elements of a novel, although fixed in temporal relation to each other, change their shape and fluctuate in their significance, because merely chronological succession becomes informed with the operations of cause and effect, and the novelistic character is seen as having assumed a unique destiny that was nevertheless inevitable. T i m e inaugurates, sustains, and augments this movement toward completion, placing everything in an evolving context and bringing everything to maturity. T h e paradigmatic novel that is performed through time and pre-formed by T i m e is the Bildiingsroman, the novel of a life-as-education wherein the process of a young life is projected as the shape that will govern its remaining years. Like the Bildungsroman, the plot of any novel we deem "realistic" will always enact and prove, in Edward Said's apt phrase, the "wedding" of "a mimetic, verbal intention to time." 3 T h e paternal promise that Father T i m e extends at the outset to the novelistic progeny of his begetting increases its powers of control as it passes through the temporal processes of narrative, until at the end it has become the "genealogical imperative," which unites the last with the first. It is this shared concept of T i m e as a linear unity—and not a mirroring of temporal process in itself—that binds the traditional novel so securely to our common sense of life. T h e novel offers, then, not a mimesis of undeliberated, organic life-in-time, but a homologue that enacts a privileged conceptualization of human life as purposeful and therefore imbued with meaning. Its rhythmic patterns, which give rise to the 5

Introduction notion that art is lifelike, are not those we discover in the work of fiction, b u t rather those which we remember from our own lives; and what we remember from the rhythm of our lives is how one event gave birth to another, in an imitation of genealogy. It is not the singular event, b u t the seriality of events about which we hold hard and fast conceptions. T h e realistic novel convinces us, not because the contents of its fictional world resemble those of our own, but because it structures experience in the same way we do; what is essential to the illusion of reality is not what happens but how it happens. "What strikes us as 'true' at a given moment in a work of art," says Harold ToIiver, following Kenneth Burke, "is not what imitates reality but what falls into place in the satisfaction of a program."' And Jose Ortega y Gasset locates the mimetic sense in the same conceptual ordering, as it is fixed by memory: "If we examine closely our ordinary notion of reality, perhaps we shall find that we do not consider real what actually happens, but a certain manner of happening that is familiar to us. In this vague sense, then, the real is not so much what is seen as what is foreseen; not so much what we see as what we know." 5 W h e n memory recalls the past event and submits it to the mind for analysis prior to a final evaluation of its impact, then memory is working in service to knowledge. And when these operations of memory and mind are translated into the past tense of novelistic narration, the historically actual, the biographically lifelike, and the artistically plausible become indistinguishable. T i m e as the shaping form becomes invisible. In order to bring T i m e out of hiding and give it the sharpest focus, I offer the metaphor of the "genealogical imperative." It equates the temporal form of the clas6

The Genealogical Imperative sical novel—the conceptualized frame within which its acts and images find their placement—with the dynastic line that unites the diverse generations of the genealogical family. As Robert Nisbet has demonstrated,0 the genealogical assumption about time most probably resulted from the metaphorical confusion of genetically linked descent, one of the oldest ideas of Western man, with mere chronological succession; put another way, the power of the metaphor (and once it is believed as literal truth, the source of its "imperative") is derived from the imputation of causality and purpose—and therefore, familial significance—to simple temporal sequence. Within the extended family the individual member is guaranteed both identity and legitimacy through the tracing of his lineage back to the founding father, the family's origin and first cause. This projectin-retrospect of the children is matched in the prospective design of the father. He extends the paternal promise of purpose throughout his progeny, bestowing upon them a legacy that contains within this structural unity an entire history of meaning. By an analogy of function, events in time come to be perceived as begetting other events within a line of causality similar to the line of generations, with the prior event earning a special prestige as it is seen to originate, control, and predict future events. When in some such manner ontological priority is conferred upon mere temporal anteriority, the historical consciousness is born, and time is understood as a linear manifestation of the genealogical destiny of events. The same lineal decorum pervades the structure of realistic narrative: all possibly random events and gratuitous details are brought into an alignment of relevance, so that at the point of conclusion all possibility has been converted into necessity within a

7

Introduction line of kinship—the subsequent having been referred to the prior, the end to the beginning, the progeny to the father. Thus in life and literature, a line has become legitimatized because our causal understanding, always for the West the better part of knowledge, has been conditioned by our existential experience of genealogical descent and destiny. Nor does linear dominance limit itself to life, the family, and prose fiction. There is a line to language in general in which, taking the sentence as a family of words and the unit of meaning, sentences grow by the same principle of serial generation, whereby sequences imply their own terminations, and closure can be traced back to origin. Furthermore, there is the line of logic that informs the disciplines of science and philosophy, whereby a "father" may be discovered perpetuating himself out of an enabling hypothesis or an initial proposition. Historiography and autobiography likewise project a direction for the transient and irreversible arrow of time, which finds its destination on a high plateau of meaning. In areas as various as these, relations between phenomena are invariably construed as a line. I would like now to survey the broad cultural manifestations of linearity, to prod them for their hows and whys, in an unsystematic and unofficial inspection that is designed to do no more than provide a comfortable buffer between stating a theory of narrative linearity and proving it in the particularity of individual novels. For those readers who are not so enamored of the omnipresence of linearity in the West, or who are already sufficiently undeceived about its place in the novel and thus eager for proof, I suggest passing over this section. To those who remain, I must apologize in advance if I seem to 8

The Genealogical Imperative be overstating the obvious: the genealogical imperative has had such a long run that, for the most of us, it has become a general social truth lost to literary consciousness, eluding us through our very overfamiliarity with its assumptions. The Family Line Although anthropologists, sociologists, and many historians agree that an understanding of the family is crucial to their investigations, there seems to be no consensus about the family either within or between these disciplines. Marriage may have originated with the capture of enemy women, for reasons of economic exchange, or as authorization of sexual intercourse; the nuclear family may have emerged with modernization, or it may have existed in preindustrial societies; the extended family may have served the transfer of property, practical arrangements for protection, or primarily emotional needs.7 Happily, I do not have to choose among these diverse hypotheses in order to establish the single factor, common to all theories of the family, which will yield the genealogical model: the Western family has always served the biological imperative of procreation, and thus has been defined consistently, if not exclusively, as the primary institution for the reproduction and maintenance of children. The obligatory link beween two generations, that which generates the linear emphasis, promotes the twin principles of authority and legitimacy: the authority of the parent over the child in the matter of rearing and education, and the legitimacy of the child's legal and social status in reference to his parents. The relationship thus established is not one of mutual reciprocity; the prerogatives for action and com9

Introduction mand reside with the family member anterior in time, the father; the son who follows is assigned a predominantly passive role. Patriarchalism, a distinctly Western specialization of the family, has been such a stable feature of European culture, both as a particular institution and as a general attitude, that its assumptions have rarely required formulation or provoked refutation. From the Biblical Fifth Commandment to "honor thy father and thy mother" evolved the forms of social obedience; the analogy between family and society survived the demise of patriarchal rule in politics, and sustained the property presuppositions of capitalism long afterwards. Itself an extreme statement of the genealogical imperative, patriarchalism found its most extreme spokesman in Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653), whose Patriarcha is remembered today only as the notorious object of John Locke's virulent attack. "A great genealogical success," as his editor calls him, "eldest of sixteen children, father of nine," a reactionary in politics and a tyrant in his own household, Sir Robert justified the historical power of the father by tracing his genealogy back to the Biblical Adam, the heir of God who was the first human, the first patriarch, the first king, and the first property owner. From the absolute primacy of the father's authority, so goes Filmer's argument, proceeds the natural inferiority of women and the inequality of all human beings, between whom the only natural bond is that of subjection without consent. This bond holds true not only for the successive generations within the family, but also for relations between the young and unrelated adults, between students and teachers, between servants and masters.8 If we can get beyond its obvious idiosyncrasy, Filmer's argument offers a wholly orthodox version of 10

The Genealogical Imperative the genealogical imperative. Its root statement—that because the father's right of proxy is natural, subjection is therefore natural—binds the children in obedience to the father not simply because they were created by his volition, but more significantly because they came after him in time. Temporal anteriority thus acquires a metaphysical priority, prestige is affixed to the point of origin, authority resides in a claim to antiquity—and all lineal decorums receive their enabling postulate. Our sense of dominant linearity depends, however, not upon the fortunes of patriarchy nor, indeed, upon the facts of the family (whatever these may be), but rather upon the emotional ideas attached to family membership. Whether or not historically the family constituted the "embryo" of class society with all its antagonisms, as Marx and Engels maintained, or whether or not society even commenced in the family, as some anthropologists argue, there is obviously some relationship between the society of parents into which every human being is born and the recognition of authority that the family commands as a social institution. Although the empirical evidence has yet to sustain the thesis, it would seem that in the child's surrender of private autonomy in favor of parental power can be found the seeds of domination and the germs of subordination that will become the action of history. Along its generational continuum, the family reveals the processes of historical time as contests for sovereignty. But the emotional texture of the family exceeds the child's desire for selffulfillment and autonomy, "the wish to be free" that Weinstein and Piatt trace as the movement toward the loose modern family. The family also takes its place at the center of a Western nostalgia for "the world we have lost" (Peter Laslett's phrase), for the pastoral origins of 11

Introduction communality that might be reduplicated in the domesticity of the hearth. This double movement of desire and repulsion for the world of the fathers informs in a major way those changes in narrative structure effected by the novelists of our own century, and by their protagonists who, in their discontent within the family line, try to master their time outside of linearity." The

Time

Line

It is no accident that the concept of linear time should be as intimate and peculiar an aspect of Western civilization as patriarchalism: the prestige of cause over effect, in historical time, is analogous to the prestige of the father over the son. Both initiate a time that may be imagined as a unidirectional and irreversible arrow, whose trajectory is determined by an original intention. T h e idea of time as a line connects with the classical idea of authority as legitimated by the "first-comer," or the political sovereign: "Whenever an emperor decided that time began with his rule, the linear conception was there: year One began with Alexander, Seleucus, Augustus, and Diocletian." 10 Nor is this tendency to sanctify the origins of a movement missing in modern politics; hence Lenin said, after seizing power, "now begins the construction of a socialist society," and Mussolini referred to the Blackshirts who marched on Rome as "fascists of the first hour." T h a t time cannot return or turn on itself is not a notion familiar to all cultures, many of which have subscribed to a cyclical version of time. For primitive man, all events were recurrences from the primordial time of their ancestors, but that was a time discontinuous with their own, and thus they could not construe their life and thought as an inherited history. In a universe that 12

The Genealogical Imperative was polytheistic, events were magical rather than responsibly related to a single First Cause, and while there might be a general trembling respect born of fear, there was no Father whose commands could be interpreted and obeyed in such a way that the individual could fulfill his place in a unique family history. Instead, man got his notion of time from observing the natural cycles of growth and decay; thus Heraclitus could conceive of time as everlasting flux, and Plato had his transmigrating souls disappear, change, and return like the seasons. (It is only in late Greek thought—with Aristotle's definition of time as the "number of motion"—that there begins to appear the quantification that will sustain a linear configuration of time.) Eastern philosophies, of course, have consistently emphasized gigantic cycles of eternal recurrence, so magnifying them that the earthly life of a single individual receives relatively scant attention; if Eastern literature tends to be symbolic rather than mimetic, one likely cause is that both lines of life and narrative have been subsumed to the universal circularity of the cosmos. The time line remains predominant only in the modern West.11 This prevailing linear sense is directly indebted to the Hebrew and Christian views of time, and specifically to how they managed the tension between time and eternity, common to all religions. The Hebrews grounded the action of the supernatural firmly within historical existence. For the chosen tribes of Israel, who established their special status through the genealogies that traced their tribal lines back to Adam through history, divine action inserted itself into the world with each generation. God was ever present to sustain the faithful and chastize the wayward, and in this respect was totally unlike previous ancient gods who, after creation, disappeared 1

S

Introduction into a discontinuous past. Only in and through the historical succession that governs the Old Testament stories could the Word be revealed. Christian theology is also profoundly lineal, but here the emphasis shifts from the past to the future, from the beginning to the end of time, when all history will be understood as the interim between the disclosure and fulfillment of its meaning. The Second Coming doesn't issue in an eternity that annuls historical process, but is rather the culmination and redemption of that process. Thus temporality and eternity are not inalterably opposed and distinct, but work together toward a purposeful consummation of life that will be beyond the finiteness and freedom of historical existence, but not above that reality. From within this Christian conception, Reinhold Niebuhr argues that history must always be considered as a matter of relations, even if minimal, as a "unity in length or time." The vision of the end becomes the view from the end, whenever meaning accrues at the termination of a ideological process, and the Christian believer can then look back retrospectively, with Niebuhr, and see history as a "total realm of coherence which requires comprehension from the standpoint of its ultimate telos."12 Work, not thought, became the mode of social being for the practicing Christian, however, and the strenuous will of Protestantism conceived of time at its most radically linear. The medieval Catholic Christian was more inclined to submit himself to God's will: God had preserved all creation in an abiding community of things in harmony, and He was guiding them all toward a completed perfection that would conform to His unknown design for the universe; therefore, medieval man was prepared not to resist, within this smoothly flowing con14

The Genealogical Imperative tinuity, the divine acts of grace that were surely carrying him toward his God. Protestant man persisted in confusing this forward motion in time with his own secular progress. With the secularization of the doctrine of the "fortunate fall," man didn't have to wait for salvation at the end of time, but could start saving himself within time. While applying to the Almighty more or less frequently on matters of private conscience, the Protestant could set about earning an earthly success and a personal immortality in the public sector. Temporality, not eternity, became the proving place of rewards and punishments. This new positive orientation toward time—time as a useful gift for the realization of human potential—allowed men to enjoy the consequences of causes they themselves had promulgated, to set goals that past performances had indicated could be fulfilled, and generally to effect their own destinies. Sustained by Calvinism and the work ethic, these fathering men— who set down estimates for the future in their programs, schedules, and budgets—kept records of the past in a similar linear shape, in the precisely chronological sequences of their annals and histories. Furthermore, when the Protestant impulse for taking self-inventories was projected onto a world imbued with the finite certainties of Newtonian time, progress became measurable and enforced the image of time as "an evenly scaled limitless tape measure," stretching from past to future with regular and predictable stages, intervals, and climaxes.13 It was this preference for quantification, inherent in capitalism, which ushered in the authority of measurement that was to extend the genealogical imperative into the world, while at the same time undermining its operations within the family; the forms of domination, !5

Introduction once familial, now became social, and the father's power declined as his prerogatives were assumed elsewhere. The Line of Language T h e relation of thought to language hardly requires explication here, since the application of linguistic analysis to cultural forms is currently everywhere in evidence, and since most of us are willing to agree that the structure of language informs consciousness and the various systems that consciousness may construct. T h e important suggestion here is that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. Different linguistic communities will demonstrate distinctive patterns, which dictate how the individual will perceive his world and conceptualize it; and as inexorable as these laws of patterning are, the speaker remains unconscious of them. These are the kind of statements, insisting upon the large implications of language study, that one may find in I. A. Richards, Wittgenstein, Jakobson, or Whorf—all of whom connect the exploration of language with the investigation of the h u m a n mind. Anton Korzybski is unquestionably of lesser stature than these giants of "metalinguistics"; nevertheless, his schematic characterization of the Indo-European languages permits us—more readily, because it is so simplified—to apprehend more immediately the working of the genealogical imperative in the languages of the West. Those languages Korzybski called "aristotelian," probably because Aristotle was the first to make explicit the structural implications of our common linguistic heritage, and thereby introduced order into Western thought. Korzybski isolates four typical tendencies of aristotelian structure: i. to obscure the difference between words and things; 2. to divide the indivisible into 16

The Genealogical Imperative artificially discrete entities; 3. to insist on a choice between either/or binary oppositions; and 4. to fail to take into account the abstractions performed at an indefinite number of levels.14 These linguistic characteristics are manifestly apparent in all systems of Western thought—historical, scientific, and philosophical—but they also correspond closely to the means through which secularized European man chose to master his time. Time was to be used and spent wisely, and for these purposes it had to be regularized and measured. Living one's life became identical with the linguistic formulations of records and schedules by which one plotted past and future (1); the fundamental premises of these activities did not need to be questioned (4); but one could instead proceed to the identification, isolation, and classification of the facts of reality (2); in order to discriminate absolutely between the true and the false, the right and the wrong (3). In some such orderly manner, then, one makes a beginning that intends an end which will unite everything in the middle with the coherence of logic. And in language as elsewhere, Western man conveniently forgets that he has fashioned this line himself (as his language has given it to him so to fashion) and that, as Korzybski was reminding us, the map is not the territory. Mastery is the prerogative of the father, and in Western languages the unit of mastery is the sentence. In defining sentence mastery as a "cultural pleasure," Roland Barthes confirms the analogy between life and language, which I am defining as the genealogical imperative. For him, the locus is the sentence: "Linguistics has always believed in the sentence and the dignity of its predictive syntax, as the form of a logic, a rationality. The sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, sub17

Introduction ordinations, internal reactions. It is always obliged to end; in fact, it is the power of completion that defines sentence mastery. It is a cultural pleasure. The law of closure, a compulsive idealization, is intolerant of fragmentation and imperfection."15 The sentence, in other words, is a genealogy in miniature. At its origin it fathers a progeny of words, sustains them throughout in orderly descent and filial obedience, and through its act of closure maintains the family of words as an exclusive totality. The relation between the parts and the whole, which in narrative is the sign of its reality, in language is the sign of intelligibility. Thus, both life and thought are delivered to us with a paternal guarantee of their legitimacy. The Line of Thought In The Order of Things Michel Foucault is also interested in the shifting relations between language and life. He argues that Western thought can be divided into epistemes, discontinuous historical periods in which only certain things can be thought and said, and he locates one great divide in the seventeenth century. Prior to that time, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man believed that knowledge was a matter of discovering the resemblances and invisible analogies among all the marks that God had stamped on the universe. Language was merely one more sign of things among a world of traces and signatures; meaning and value resided in the similitudes uncovered by hermeneutics and semiology. The hero of the Same, the archetypal madman-poet, was Don Quixote, wandering through the world among the resemblances of things, his every adventure an attempt to convert reality into a sign. The epistemological shift from sameness to dif18

The Genealogical Imperative ference was signaled by the preference for classification and causal reasoning over analogy, for metonymical combination over metaphorical substitution, for logic over magic. With Bacon and Descartes, the heroes of Difference, rationalism was born. Comparison, heretofore a matter of analogy, now fell under the standards of measurement and order, which depended upon the establishment of differences down to the smallest degree. To know became to discriminate, rather than to draw together, and logical analysis took the place of predominance that had been occupied by the hierarchy of analogies. Language was not then a sign after all, but a tool which, withdrawn from the midst of things, could then be employed as an independent system to divide the whole into its parts, to establish series leading from the simple to the complex, and to beget thought upon experience by establishing hypotheses through inductive inference.10 From Foucault's tremendously fertile excavations, I have deliberately helped myself only to those aspects that have direct bearing upon my argument. The point here is that language and thought both gain a structure, when they adopt the system of relations generated and perpetuated by the linear chain; language and thought, released from the indiscriminate agglutinations characteristic of knowledge-as-similarity, are now freed for projects which will construe the world as various genealogical orders. Science, philosophy, history all become possible, once a beginning or origin can be sanctioned in such a way that all future stages in the process that follows can be referred back to that initial authority. In all three of these disciplines, the genealogical enterprise enjoyed a long run before its premises were seriously challenged or even disclosed. One convenient map*9

Introduction ping that might be offered would extend, in philosophy, from Descartes to Husserl; in science, from Newton to Einstein; in history, from Bacon to Nietzsche. In all cases, the demise of genealogical thinking is roughly co­ terminous with the swerve away from linear narrative in the twentieth-century novels (and a few novels of the nineteenth) that are the concern of this study. Right now, however, I am concerned with establishing not the end b u t the beginning of linear dominance, and for that purpose no one is more instructive than R e n e Descartes, whom we may observe constructing for Western con­ sciousness the genealogy of rational thought. In his Dis­ course on Method Descartes seeks a sufficient father to beget philosophical inquiry; he finds, and then discards, him through the steps of logical process. Descartes first divides his ολνη " I " from his body; he then defines that "I" as the privileged origin of thought, with the formula­ tion, " I think, therefore I a m " ; next, he identifies the perfection of a First Principle with God's perfection as First Cause; finally, he cuts off God from the present, and establishes thereby a system that is not itself neces­ sary, b u t in which every particular thought follows necessarily from the one immediately preceding it. T h u s mental operations initiate, sustain, and complete a line of thought, whose descent can be traced from intuition to inference to hypothesis, both forward and backward; "As the last are demonstrated by the first which are their causes, the first in their t u r n are demonstrated by the last which are their effects." This is verification by coherence, a familial enthusiasm that will always choose the relations among objects rather than the discrete ob­ ject itself as the proving place of thought. ("I thought that, in order to better understand them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines." 20

The Genealogical

Imperative

This is an orientation as basic to scientific and historical thought as it is to Western philosophy and all systems of symbolic logic.) W i t h Descartes, the genealogical imperative seizes the h u m a n mind as another of its domains: the thing itself is apprehended through its serial connections, and its identity is then established through its placement within a family line, which itself exhibits an internal coherence in no way dependent upon a reality outside itself.17 The Line of

Narrative

While Descartes was setting the mind in paternal order, Francis Bacon was ordering the line of h u m a n events. H e was the first of the secular historiographers who, having lost God as a First Cause, would set about discovering how events had indeed begotten other events in a line of genealogy. W i t h Bacon, historical knowledge became specialized as the knowledge of the causes of things, and historical narratives, in this received tradition, continued to be written as structures of genetic descent, without u n d u e anguish over the possibility that historical knowledge was itself problematic. 18 One way of approaching that problem—and of making the connection between historical and fictional narratives—is to consider a third kind of narrative: the autobiographical. One philosopher of history quite different from Bacon, Wilhelm Dilthey, was especially fond of directing historians to autobiography in order to learn its lessons. Dilthey was, in fact, passionately convinced that the writer of history must hearken to not only the imperatives of his m i n d but also the linear realities that he was constantly employing to give order to his life. T h u s , the patterns of life revealed in the writing of autobiography, Dilthey suggested, might well serve the historian as a 21

Introduction model for his own writing. In fact, they can hardly avoid doing so, as Dilthey says, for "the task of historical presentation is already half performed by life." The realm of the human sciences is a "mind-affected world," and dealing centrally with man as they do, they must imitate man's own ordering of time as a line: Autobiography is the highest and most instructive form in which the understanding of life confronts us. Here is the outward, phenomenal course of a life which forms the basis of understanding what has produced it within a certain environment. The man who understands it is the same as he who created it. A particular intimacy of understanding results from this. The person who seeks the connecting threads in the history of his life has already, from different points of view, created a coherence in that life which he is now putting into words. He has created it by experiencing values and realizing purposes in his life, making plans for it, seeing his past in terms of development and his future as the shaping of his life and of whatever he values most. He has, in his memory, singled out and accentuated the moments which he experienced as significant; others he has allowed to sink into forgetfulness. The future has corrected his illusions about the significance of certain moments. Thus, the first problem of grasping and presenting historical connections is already half solved by life.19 Fictional narratives exhibit the same structure of human temporality as do the life-informed historical narratives that Dilthey recommends, and our reading of them provides an experience very similar to our life 22

The Genealogical Imperative experience of participating in and understanding time. The experience and the analysis of time are operations performed from opposite ends of the time line: in living from moment to random moment, the experience is prospective; but when we retrospectively analyze time— "grasping and presenting historical connection" and giving time an "unlifelike shaping"—it is then that the genealogical imperative exerts its control. J. Hillis Miller, who has consistently read the novel as "not a spatial structure of simultaneously related parts but an everchanging rhythm of relationship," discovers this double dimension of time in what he calls the "paradox of the first and second reading." It is a paradox, significantly, that is most fully embodied in the first-person narrator of the autobiographical novel. On a first reading of any novel, the reader is generally occupied with taking in its succession, whereas in a second reading he gives full rein to the genealogical impulse toward shaping. In the autobiographical novel, however, where the narrator and protagonist are one, that single person incorporates both reading operations. Here is Miller's description of the process: The protagonists live their lives in ignorance of the future. The narrator speaks from the perspective of the end. The reader enjoys both these points of view at once. He experiences the novel as the reaching out of the protagonist's point of view toward the narrator's point of view, as if at some vanishing point they might coincide. This reaching out toward completeness, in which the circle of time will be drawn closed, is the essence of human temporality. . . . The narrator of a first-person novel returns eventually back through 23

Introduction his past to himself in the present, but at a higher level of comprehension, it may be, than he had when he began the story. . . . Even so, the moment of return from a journey through the past to the present, is the crucial instant in a first-person novel. 20 What Miller calls "the circle of time" is actually the doubling back of two linear journeys: the setting out at the beginning, when nothing is known (prospective experience), and the analysis at the end of the journey, when everything is known (retrospective evaluation). At the end of a book, as at the close of a life, is the beginning of T r u t h . Disorder is b u t a prelude to meaning —tentative as that may be—and novelistic time, which renders the discontinuity characteristic of human beingin-the-world from "the perspective of the end," fosters a sense of meaningful continuity. Indeed, continuity may be the most embracing expectation we have for the novel that rehearses in its structure the family line. Roland Barthes has referred to narrative as "that great category of the continuous," and his explication of this conceptualized assumption will serve as our best introduction to the twentieth-century revolt against the genealogical imperative: T h e [traditional] Book is an object which connects, develops, runs, and flows, in short, has the profoundest horror vacui. Sympathetic metaphors of the Book are: fabric to be woven, water flowing, flour to be milled, paths to be followed, curtains parting, etc.; antipathetic metaphors are those of a fabricated object, i.e., an object assembled out of discontinuous raw materials: on one side, the 24

The Genealogical

Imperative

"flow" of living, organic substances, the charming unpredictability of spontaneous liaisons; on the other, the ungrateful sterility of mechanical contraption, of cold and creaking machinery (this is the theme of the laborious). For what is hidden behind this condemnation of discontinuity is obviously the myth of life itself: the Book must flow because fundamentally, despite centuries of intellectualism, our criticism wants literature to be, always, a spontaneous, gracious activity conceded by a god, a muse, and if a god or muse happens to be a little reticent, one must at least "conceal one's labor." T o write is to secrete words within that great category of the continuous which is narrative. . . . All literature, even if it is didactic or intellectual (after all, we must put u p with some of the novel's poor relations), should be a narrative, a flow of words in the service of an event or an idea which "makes its way" toward its denouement or its conclusion: not to "narrate" its object is, for the Book, to commit suicide. 21 T h e first English novel to commit such narrative suicide—and thus, a great favorite of the rebellious sons of the modern era—was Tristram Shandy. Its narrative has its being in a voice that pleads the difficulty of getting born and of making a beginning, of getting it all in and making connections, and of ending on a note more significant than that of a "cock and bull story." In presenting consciousness and structure as a muddle, Sterne's novel may be read as a deliberate violation and critique of the orderly descent demanded of narrative by the genealogical metaphor. W h e n the raw material of Tristram's life becomes too much for the ordering 25

Introduction operations of Tristram's mind, then we see exposed the mind-informed conceptualization typical to the narrative line of a traditional novel. Sterne is constantly reminding us that it is the mind, working contrary to the randomness of experience, that imposes causality, reduces possibilities, covers man with meaning, and ignores any cosmos beyond society's norms. This list of grievances, implicit in Sterne, is very often explicit in the modern novelist who seeks, by subverting the genealogical line, to abolish the dominant but false concept of organic relationship within the novel. Our novelists—with the monumental exception of that apostle of linearity, Thomas Mann—have given voice to a deeper inner and a wider outer time; they have fragmented, frozen, and fused the three aspects of time; they have lost, overvalued, or deplored the past, and decapitated or rewritten the future. Nor does the family in its generations survive this assault on linearity. Patrilineal authority gives way to matrilateral accommodation, relations of descent to those of affiliation, the socialized family to the biological community or mythical alienation. All the sins against the family—adultery, illegitimacy, bigamy, fratricide, parricide, and especially incest—can be found within a spectrum of value that arches from the tragic recognition of disorder to its joyous celebration. Nor does the traditional story line prevail. In these novels continuity must confront discontinuity—in cooperation, mediation, or antagonism —and when the part asserts its independence from the whole, the space of that moment is jammed with unlikely juxtapositions and irrational metamorphoses. W i t h the proliferation of possibilities, meaning and morality are suspended, withheld, or pluralized. T h e simple line, which served well enough as the spatial configuration 26

The Genealogical Imperative of genealogical structures, is replaced by such wild divergencies as the double cycle, the circle, the spiral, and the Moebius strip. All this is exemplary activity, entirely appropriate to those creators of new worlds and new ways of knowing them. That the genealogical metaphor would not be able to maintain its imperatives was already prophesied in the progressively nonlinear works of the modern writer whom Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man designated as the most "time-obsessed"—James Joyce. Joyce's first autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although more or less conventionally linear in its structure, pictures at its end Stephen saying his non serviam to the paternal authority of father, church, and nation—in order to declare himself fatherless and initiate the state of being that is fundamental to anyone who himself is going to be a creator. Waking from "the nightmare of history" in Ulysses, Stephen finds that as a Kunstlerromane hero he is superseded by a quite different man, Leopold Bloom, who is defined as a member of the same biological species almost wholly through his physiological systems, his preconscious musings, and his aimless encounters with the other "wandering rocks" moving about the space (not time) of Dublin. Unlike the heroic Ulysses, the new hero is a cuckold with no male heir and no hope of dynasty, tied by marriage to a Penelope who lingers alone in her bed wrapped within a mythopoeic dream of sex as unproductive recreation. By the time Joyce reaches Finnegans Wake, H. C. Earwicker has exchanged his individualized, human identity for the cosmic universality of Here Comes Everybody, and in his incarnation as Haveth Childers Everywhere is divested of any remnants of responsible paternity. 27

Introduction The authors represented in this study—Mann, Lawrence, Faulkner, Nabokov, Marquez—do not surpass in their novels the "all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history" of the Wake; instead, they represent the leading edge of a modern literary movement that has swept beyond them to a future in which all of them, except Marquez, can play no part. If they have, as I think, rejected the "whence" of the traditional novel of the past, they also do not participate in the future of the novel—the "whither" upon which I shall speculate in the concluding chapter. Whether or not the genealogical imperative survives in the novel's future remains to be seen, but that it impels the thought of this study should be already obvious. As critics we are all probably more Aristotelian, Euclidean, Newtonian, Cartesian, and Darwinian than we care to acknowledge. And surely it is a fitting tribute to the pervasiveness of the genealogical imperative that the critic who narrates its subversion should yet demonstrate its tenacious power.

28

1 Subverting the Father: Some Nineteenth-Century Precursors

In a study devoted to the disclosure of a genealogy's imperatives, any search for "roots" is necessarily subject to the greatest irony. I hope I may escape that consequence here by concentrating upon structural affiliations rather than historical descent. There are some novels, prior to those of our own century, that demonstrate a structural stress expressive of their authors' tentative discomfort with linear dominance, and these seem to presage the full assault against dynastic narrative mounted by the modern authors we will be considering. Since the nineteenth century was so preeminently the century of the paternal prerogative, and novelistic strategies had to be worked out within the cramped and constrained space that a triumphant normalcy accords to deviancy, these techniques under pressure are much more pointedly prophetic than, say, the almost casual eccentricities of English novelists in the eighteenth century, when paternal ordering was felt to be the provision, at the cosmic rather than social level, of a providential God or an underlying rational principle. More restless than rebellious, Emily Bronte, Herman Melville, and Samuel Butler nevertheless must appear as the supreme bastards in any literary history that traces the novelistic line of descent from Jane Austen and discerns its most illustrious heirs in George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph 29

Subverting the Father Conrad. In the "great tradition," as it has been construed by F. R. Leavis, Wuthering Heights, Pierre, and The Way of All Flesh must figure as anomalies, embarrassments, "sports," precisely because, given their historical placement, their authors should have known better; whereas Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne can be patted on the head and comfortably dismissed because they were writing at the "infancy" of the novel. T h e novel that obeys the father and the novel that subverts him, of course, were both born in eighteenthcentury England—the novel and antinovel almost, if not quite, twins of the same parturition, and each equally dedicated to fathering upon literature the basic mimetic illusion that "this really happened." From the abundance of titles that announce the "history of" or the "life of" a character, one might well surmise that the eighteenth-century novel recognized historical time as the medium of human experience, and wrote it accordingly. Largely, this was not so. An employment of the historical dimension of time would focus upon a protagonist who gains an identity and a destiny through experiential interactions with a society that matures and judges him—a society, in fact, that stands with the father. Instead, we find that what should be earned at the social level within the book has already been conferred by a fathering presence outside the book. A providential God has made good his paternal promise by maintaining a stabilized and objectified public world, and a benevolent author guarantees and sustains his protagonist, often saving the day and the life alike by being at once deaf to Fate and attuned to Fortune. Heir to these two grand paternal assurances, the hero or heroine undergoes random and colorful adventures in front of a panoramic backdrop, and the "history" of a

3°

Precursors life becomes a record of ill or good luck, as their disposition is ordained by the novel's two founding fathers. Roderick Random is haplessly batted about in a world haphazardly cruel in its punishments; Moll Flanders gets and loses husbands, children, goods, and money with a zesty freedom from practical and moral consequences; Tom Jones is excused all faults in the name of candor and spontaneity, virtues that return him to the embrace of a stepfather called Allworthy and a sweetheart named Sophia. In a successful attempt to relate literary structure to genre conventions, Ralph Rader has designated these novelistic lives as "simulations" of naive autobiography and picaresque biography, lest we neglect how much art has gone into their making. 1 1 also want to make much of authorial presence and control in the eighteenth century, but not in the interest of recognizing the component of aesthetic choice. The phenomenon is far more embracing than that. Rather, I think we are seeing in this preference for additive-episodic structures an expression of a temporal perspective that devalues the prospective and retrospective predictability that we ourselves customarily assign to beginnings and ends. Their "fictions of concord," to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase, are not ours. When the authorizing center of order is acknowledged as being outside the story (or above life), then there exists no need at the level of narrative (or of a life) for a strict coherence between the two terminals of beginning and end (birth and death) to establish the proof of that order. Orphans and foundlings, the characters are let loose in the world without ever having been born into it, foregoing the delicacy of initiation rites and the general concern for their education which a society responsive to and responsible for them would 31

Subverting the Father have institutionalized as stages in their maturing process. Since these protagonists are not expected to depart from their human nature given at the outset, the sequence and succession of their life events need have no causal significance. W h a t delights us in these early English novels—knowing, as we do, that the terminals will take care of themselves—is their generously muddled middles of erratic adventures, any of which could be subtracted from these "histories" without seriously affecting their final outcomes, which most often reflect a philosophical inclination toward "hearty benevolence" or "virtue rewarded," never the unfolding inevitability of a narrative line that welds character to fate. For the novelists also, the interest seems to be in the local color along the indeterminate way: Defoe working u p his enumerative details, Fielding having a try with stagecomedy routines, Smollett glancing sideways with the eyes of rogue and traveler. Diversity, in the eighteenth century, yields most pleasure when it is matched by whole-witted resourcefulness on the part of authors and characters; strategies for coherence, thriving elsewhere than in the time-and-again plot, would remove most of the fun. Yet, outside this merry troup, there are two great novels which announce the shape and spirit that will dominate the nineteenth-century novel, which proclaims cause and effect as the assertion of a basic cosmic order in h u m a n events. T h e literary line of descent from Clarissa Harlowe to Tess Durbeyfield is a direct one of sisters-in-suffering. Both young women, disobedient to the father and strayed from the family, suffer sexual violation by an alien aristocrat. Although nefariously more sinned against than sinning, they cross the boundary between "maiden" and "maiden n o more" (Hardy's 32

Precursors chapter headings), an irreversible moral progress that inevitably terminates in the ritual death and immediate sanctification of the scapegoated virgin/harlot. Everything in the novels prepares us for the end—every word, gesture, detail, and episode is fraught with portent. When time is moralized as the primary ordering principle, interpretation is encouraged at every point, and, because of the book's integrity, always rewarding. Even within a looser, more panoramic form, the traditional nineteenth-century novel reverberates with a moral thud at its culmination. Tolstoy, for instance, far surpasses both Richardson and Hardy in his investment in the genealogical spirit. For him, the family is the proper ordering center for civilization, and he writes War and Peace and Anna Karenina so that they may corroborate that conviction. T h e young Natasha, therefore, may ride wild to the hunt, lean ecstatically out of upstairs windows into the night, flirt with Prince Andre; but the mature Natasha, physically and morally thickened by time, will settle down with Pierre and the diapers, content to be among the anonymous swarm through whom civilization evolves. Therefore also Anna, whose sexuality threatens civilization just as surely as the curls escaping around her neck provoke adulterers, must be sacrificed to Kitty and Levin, with their jam-making and mowing and their brood of children. Tolstoy furnishes a happy, comic equivalent to Clarissa, the novel whose offspring populate the nineteenth-century literary scene, and next to which the other major productions of the eighteenth century appear irresponsibly playful or frivolously manipulative. Except for Robinson Crusoe. T h a t is the second exception among the novels of its own century—a novel so powerfully persuasive for the following century that

33

Subverting the Father it went through seven hundred editions before 1900. Crusoe is the great hero who inflicts culture on nature —who, determined to forge a consistent line from his past to his present, remembers his acculturation and reproduces that world on his island. Under the guise of generating culture out of nature, Crusoe demonstrates a socio-economic progress, through which all the supposedly "natural" needs of man are made to seem necessary, and thereby confirms all the great lessons of a Protestant, mercantile civilization. A calendar is indispensable, writing an obsession. Tools, cooking, and housing develop from the rudely minimal to the commodiously maximal; and promptly after Crusoe's habitation has evolved through the tree-hut/tent/double tent escalation, our protagonist discovers that he requires a house in the country on the other side of his island. (One almost hears Kurtz on the horizon intoning, "My castle! My kingdom! My island!") Ever renouncing the slightest visitations of personal, natural desires, Crusoe comes to represent the paternal principle in its purest personification, and in making a society in his own image, institutes the master/slave culture of Hegelian analysis. The customary metamorphosis of the patriarch into a god operates here in an interesting variation upon the book of Genesis: Crusoe creates, Friday comes, and He rests.2 With this deconstructed version of Robinson Crusoe (read, admittedly, from the privileged point of hindsight and very much against the grain of its contemporary reception), we are already a hundred years ahead in time, in the century of the line. And that line was historical. Public thought and private experience were widely infected with the different manifestations of "historicism" that reached their maturity during the 34

Precursors 1800s. The earth itself yielded up, in fossils and bones, the secret of its advanced age, giving the lie to both Biblical and scientific estimates of its short life span, and in 1830 the young Charles Lyell wrote that history in his Principles of Geology. Then Charles Darwin, himself a "time voyager" in the century Loren Eiseley has named for him,3 discovered that species had not after all been permanently fixed on Noah's Ark, and he wrote that history of mutability as a genealogy in his Origin of Species. Man's own human history, left so long to the fragmented particularizing of chaotic event, could now be written under the paternal guarantee of a single law governing permanence and change. It is of only minor importance that there was disagreement over whether this law was evolutionary (Huxley, Spencer), cyclical (Vico, Nietzsche), or dialectical (Hegel, Comte, Marx); what counted, here as elsewhere, was that there was indeed a Father Time sustaining an order among his only apparently unruly progeny. The fact of genetic descent led to the naming of the father, temporal process was fully legitimized in all its variations, and change no longer had to be feared for its randomness. Time could safely become dynamic once the historical consciousness realized that it could predict change along the dynastic line of past, present, and future. When change is no longer a catastrophic wild card, but becomes rather a purposive and progressive element in a scheme of things, persons, and events, then a time-line comes to represent the most optimistic of continuities. The appropriation of this public domain of time for private use and instruction was immediate and enthusiastic. Victorian man discovered that to be living in time was no longer a fallen state, but rather the very field of action on which he could win the twin trophies of 35

Subverting the Father earthly success and spiritual salvation. With a favorable time index attached to them, economic progress and upward social mobility became the secular counterparts of the divine rewards for Christian steadfastness. T h e r e was no longer any moral justification in abiding and standing still, since human potential now found itself in a temporal dimension where one's grasp and one's reach almost coincided. T h e cultural transmission of this moral energy and confidence was institutionalized in the Victorian family, where, by teaching the children well, one might personally assure the survival of the fittest. More than the novels of other ages, the Victorian novel pays respectful homage to the real world that conceived it. T h e novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Hardy, and James are mimetic monuments to an age in which clarity and scrupulousness were valued as highly as social and moral norms. This is a very high road to travel indeed, and those who trod it—we like to think now, in our distance of safety—were doomed to stumble. But the Victorians themselves were never foolishly anything, certainly not foolishly optimistic. They had eyes to see the center that could not hold. Still, even the harshest critics of the culture built their novels like the Rock of Gibraltar: the center might not hold, b u t the structure would. N o matter how severe an indictment the novelist might bring against his real world, no matter how devastating a picture he might paint of social disintegration, his novel with its ordered progress in time offered a disproof of his vision of disorder. W e have come to know, if the Victorians didn't, how paltry are the reassurances offered by the policies of containment. So we look back perhaps nostalgically 36

Precursors to these heroes and heroines with their important origins and backgrounds, their fictional worlds prepared for their active engagement, their willful shaking of time to make it release a destiny. Victorian beginnings are ever an orientation; by the end of the novel, its direction will have been meticulously documented, understood, and judged. Housed—like Darwin's species— in a family line, fictional characters evolve. They are not bounced about, fatherless, in a world supremely fathered, as was Tom Jones; they do not obstinately repeat themselves in adventure-censure, narrative capsules, as did Moll Flanders. No. Instead, Pip and Dorothea and Henry Esmond and Jude and Isabel Archer inherit their legacies and meet their destinies in novels where spacious familial accommodations are always guaranteed by the patrilinear consistencies between beginning and end, past and future. Nor will crossing national boundaries—to Hester Prynne or Pere Goriot or Young Werther or Raskolnikov—disrupt in any substantial aspect the century's unshaken faith in the structural reliability of the genealogical imperative. The novels I consider next are among those that refused this accommodation, that could not assent to the line, that stick out as the deviants of literary history— the bastard progeny of paternal narrative. Although all three have the form of the generational novel, they nonetheless feature families irregular in nature and nurture, times that are negations of and alternatives to historical time, and narrative structures in which the endings somehow disconfirm the beginnings. Wuthering Heights, Pierre, and The Way of All Flesh have been too long notorious for their strangeness and, of late, too comfortably fashionable for their obscurity; the eye that 37

Subverting the Father shifts its gaze momentarily (in these cases, toward the parameters of structure) almost always returns to its object with a sharper focus. Wuthering

Heights:

M Y T H AND HISTORY, REPETITION AND ALLIANCE

Any moral progress, charted on a graph as an upward curve, has a heavy investment in the excellence at the end. W h e n the theme of progress is represented by the genetic success of a family, that high point of achievement is reserved for those members of the final generation. From its publication u p to the present time, Emily Bronte's novel has attracted readers eager to confirm its orthodoxy as a fiction totally informed with the moral logic of the nineteenth century. In this view, Cathy and Hareton of the second generation signal the triumph of the good children over the bad father in the domestic ideal of social marriage. With the revocation of the diabolic principle in the father and of the mutual selfdestructiveness of the original couple, the new society may be born from a union of compatibility and goodwill. T h e novel, therefore, progresses exactly as it should: a satisfying temporal development from a beginning in demonic dehumanization of the first generation to a commendatory rehumanization in the second generation. T h e narrative pursues a coherent course, culminating in an exact coincidence of aesthetic description and moral prescription. In her preface to the 1850 edition, Charlotte Bronte is intent to point out those virtues most conducive to fostering a continuity within h u m a n relations ("For a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity, look at the character of Nelly Dean. . . . For an example of 38

Precursors constancy and tenderness, remark the character of Edgar Linton"). For the first generation, whose deviant passions tear all asunder, Charlotte has only phrases that damn (Catherine is "in the midst of perverted passion and passionate perversity," and Heathcliff is "in his arrow-straight course to perdition"). More recently, in arguing for an historical impulse within the Gothic novel, Francis R. H a r t has located the demonic as a mimetic component within human character, whose destructiveness is the suffering expression of perverted love. Catherine and Heathcliff are lost souls who might have been saved in a different familial and social situation. 4 Any impulse to naturalize Wuthering Heights, to make it convenient to culture—from whatever sisterly or heuristic motives—ignores the fact that the moral coercion of the end can never command the reader's interest in Cathy and Hareton. Nelly Dean may wring her hands, Lockwood may shudder, Joseph may utter the Calvinist curse—we still have eyes only for Catherine and Heathcliff. Wrapped in pallor, the final generation is trapped in the aftermath and anticlimax of historical time—the dead end of time, in a novel that sacralizes the mythic originals at its beginning. Yet Cathy and Hareton must suffer their dimunition at the point of emphasis, the end, because, with Dorothy Van Ghent, we cannot imagine Catherine and Heathcliff surviving a narrative progress: "Whatever would happen to these two, if they could be happily together, would be something altogether asocial, amoral, savagely irresponsible, wildly impulsive: it would be the enthusiastic, experimental, quite random activity of childhood, occult to the socialized adult." 5 Precisely. T h e adults of the first generation are the children, and the children of the 39

Subverting the Father second generation are the adults. In Catherine and Heathcliff we see the childhood of the race, and we recognize in the same instant the tremendous imaginative impact of mythical man upon historical consciousness, and the impossibility of assimilating that past to our present. Because we cannot trace the descent of the historical from the mythic, because that original fathering is the unknowable, we sanctify the two lovers at the very moment we expel them from the story line, as natural forces of savagery unsuited to the bloodlessness of civilized characterization." As Rene Girard would say, "we scapegoat them," never knowing that this sacrifice is the surest means of keeping them forever with us.7 However, our immediate interest here lies not in the symbolic mechanism that triggers the leap from nature to culture, but rather the consequences of that gap for literary form. Linear projects must invariably reduce undifferentiated abundance to clearly differentiated order if they are to move in a forward direction; like history and science, the classical novel requires at the outset a distinct definition of phenomena, so that they may serve the general laws of its own operation. The novel cannot tread water in some primal soup, hopelessly marking time and awaiting a narrative science of the concrete to drift up from the gigantic depths or float over from the murky peripheries. And the novelist who assumes that he can both get on with business and incorporate the mythical soon finds the meal indigestible. Mythic elements, first of all, feed an appetite for repetition that tends to abrogate the cause-and-effect descent of the genealogical model. Once the father is identified as the mythical founder, as Heathcliff and Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen are, he does not originate a 40

Precursors family line; instead, dominating by attraction, he spawns a literary progeny who compulsively reproduce himself in ever paler reduplications that eventually bleach out into the ghosts of the historical present. By inscribing the holiness of the mythical, repetition proscribes individual identity and destiny. This is why Quentin Compson's final failure convinces, and the little EarnshawLintons' success does not; all three characters are seen as metaphorical substitutions of the progenitor, but only Faulkner's structure demonstrates that myth survives only when the historical projects of retrieval fail. T h e incongruity of a mythical-historical descent may also be written spatially, as the incompatibility between novelistic parts and the whole, between the fictional self and its world: Catherine and Heathcliff have no social destiny, just as the mythical Buendia family can have no historical destiny within Garcia Marquez' novel, and just as Nabokov's transcending lovers enjoy the erotic fruits of Eden only because he never makes them leave their garden for a real world. Lateral alliance may threaten lineal descent as effectively as mythical repetition does. T h e sideways glance inevitably prevents one from going ahead. Any coupling —of details and lovers, especially incestuous ones—entails an erotic subversion of the genealogical pursuit. Indeed, the magnetic attraction between Catherine and Heathcliff produces, as in the twentieth-century lovers of Lawrence and Nabokov, the surest escape from patrilineal succession. T h e erotic couple inverts all the virtues of fathering—continuity, authority, inclusiveness, asexuality—and presents to narrative structure the tantalizing possibilities for discontinuity, freedom, and exclusiveness. Once the novel's historical time becomes contaminated or haunted or enriched by the mythical 41

Subverting the Father and primitive, the one impossible distance from beginning to end is a straight line; thereafter, the novel must depart from the lineal coercion of narrative and entice myth into structure through new schemes of accommodation that will most certainly participate variously in the atemporal. Pierre, or, the

Ambiguities:

INCEST, INDETERMINACY, AND FRAGMENTATION

Melville begins in the tradition of the domestic novel, with his hero Pierre Glendinning as the idealized and idealistic heir of the family's feudal estate at Saddle Meadows. He is, according to the admiring narrator, an American reduplication of the English country aristocracy in the matter "of large estates and long pedigrees —pedigrees, I mean, wherein is no flaw." Pierre's pedigree, however, will be revealed as loathsomely flawed with adultery, illegitimacy, and suicide, aberrations within the family line that reflect Melville's analogous distortions of the century's conventional time and story lines. For Pierre—especially in its theme, b u t also in its structure—is grievously a both) and book, as the "ambiguities" of its subtitle indicates. T h e traditional novel has consistently functioned on the basis of either I or, its narrative progress making at every point a choice among possibilities, in a sorting process that gradually converts all these choices into the logical, moral, and psycho-social necessities of plot and character-—with the result that the protagonist gains a history that clearly differentiates, among its acts and events, the hero either as responsible agent or as a victim of destiny. In Melville's novel, to the contrary, things are so arranged that 42

Precursors whenever Pierre "chooses," particularly in the area of familial and sexual relationships, he gets stuck with the negative alternative also. The ambiguities begin early, with a radical confusion of the rigid and unambiguous genealogical distinctions among descent, affiliation, and alliance. It is not enough that the proud matriarch Mary Glendinning should have an attentive, affectionate son (descent), that their pet names for each other are "Brother Pierre" and "Sister Mary" (affiliation), and that this domestic doubling takes on the incestuous overtones of mistress and courtly lover (alliance). But Pierre repeats this triple play within his own generation: "his conversational conversion of a mother into a sister harkened his nominal conversion of a sister into a wife." Upon discovering Isabel as the illegitimate daughter of his dead father, Pierre disinherits himself, thereby severing the bonds of descent, but only from the filial motives of preserving his mother's peace of mind and his deceased father's stainless reputation; he passes in the city as the husband of his half-sister, once again contaminating affiliation with incest and contaminating the purity of motive with indeterminate desire, obligation, and necessity; with his former sweetheart Lucy cohabiting with the couple as his "nun-like cousin," Pierre foregoes his original alliance for merely generalized kinship, yet with a celibacy that only escalates desire. Near the end Pierre questions all the steps in this progress—steps that he heretofore had considered as given by conscience and circumstance—and finding only ambiguity, he ends his life and Isabel's in prison, a double suicide by poison, doubly a pact between lovers and siblings. Similarly, for the critic the story seems to accommodate an overload of interpretation: it seems not to matter whether we speak of Freud's 43

Subverting the Father "family romance" and the Oedipal complex, Girard's "triangular desire," or Levi-Strauss's "underdetermination of kinship." What we cannot say, however, is that Pierre either has done himself in or been victimized by a cruel world, for his social actions are as fully mockeries of interdependence as are his intrigues within the family. Plinlimmon's pamphlet offers a philosophic appraisal of life that is absurd in the illogic of its double bind: Even though chronometrical time (heavenly and absolute) is transcendentally superior to horological time (historical and relative), "virtuous expediency," rather than solid righteousness is the path of the ideal through the real world. As an "Enthusiast of Duty," Pierre is the chronometric soul who supposedly imposes himself on circumstances, yet it is horological time that casts him down. T h e oxymoronic lesson seems to be that when circumstances themselves turn incestuous and ambiguous, then purposefulness can only be suicidal, and Pierre must give u p his linear quest for a singular truth as a sacrifice to horological indeterminacy. Both narrative voice and narrative structure range between these poles of overdetermined decisiveness and underdetermined muddle. T h e narrator is a self-conscious, rhetorical poseur, who establishes his discontinuity with the hero in asides, apostrophes, and addresses which, furthermore, force the reader out of any relentless narrative continuity. Comfortable with the literary conventions of eulogy, the narrator all but smothers Pierre with his fathering during Pierre's innocence, but after the fall he abandons Pierre to chaos, taking flight himself in prophecy, admonishment, and philosophical generalization. In analogous fashion, the structure promises, and then withdraws the promise of, 44

Precursors patrilinearity. T h e chapter titles—dotted with the abstractions of lineal order, such as "presentiment and verification," "retrospective," "misgivings and preparations," "the resolution"—advertise a regularity they do not deliver. T o insist upon a coherence between beginning, middle, and end (Melville might have said) would be as suicidal as Pierre's unqualified mandate to honor his father and mother above all else. If the artist is to reach the depth of life's mysteries in an incestuous world, he cannot rest upon the false assurance of surmise-andsatisfaction sequences on the surface. T h e novel's structure enacts the fate of the dive below: the premature assignment of allegorical, chronometrical meaning gets diffused into fragments that determine nothing. This is the narrative wisdom that Melville allows the narrator to voice as his own: "the profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies and have no proper endings, but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate." Conventional novels, facing the unfathomable fullness of the fragments, rush to reduce their indeterminacy within the coercive order of narrative linearity. Pierre is the "mutilated stump" that Melville writes as the narrative corrective of truth. Meaning is constantly forced upon us, and inevitably withheld; the fragments—in the "audacious, intermeddling impotency" of their both/and—are never sufficiently subdued to prepare the catastrophe of the end. Melville's indictment of the line is far more radical than Emily Bronte's. Without questioning on her own behalf, she makes us question the hold that myth has on history, the power of the beginning over the end; 45

Subverting the Father Melville pointedly mocks our valorization of both beginnings and ends. T h e great novel cannot rehearse in its progeny of events the "fair succession of an honourable race," because as soon as "fair" and "honourable," beauty and truth, become ambiguously relative, "succession" is revealed as a base fiction. If everything is underdetermined, unavoidably idiosyncratic, and enigmatic, then the author who aligns himself with his quester-hero, in an assumption that the Holy Grail awaits at the end of the book, is both a fool and a liar. T h e truth of the both/and and the lie of the either/ or constitute the double conviction that underlies an array of strategies in the modern novel. Both ironic consciousness and Utopian hope stand behind those alternatives to genealogical structure that engage in underwriting—that value underdetermination over coherence, metamorphosis over development, the part over the whole. Faulkner's novel mocks his narrators, who constantly overwrite the story of Sutpen in order to "get it straight"; Lawrence believes that moral and aesthetic integrity resides in the refusal to designate and specify, to get the "bottom line" of things; Nabokov liberates his incestuous lovers and their narrative to the beauties of the freely combining, fragmented detail; and Garcia Marquez writes an exuberant narrative that rushes pellmell beyond any discrimination and selectivity. This sense of the pitfalls and possibilities of incestuous time is a direct legacy from Melville. Ernest Pontifex,

or The Way of All

Flesh:

SELF-BEGETTING, SPACE, AND FORGETFULNESS

Except for its ending, Samuel Butler's novel offers few surprises and little structural interest: it is the conven46

Precursors tional, linear story that passes from the birth to the maturity of the hero, as told by an impartial and reliable narrative guide. Its inclusion here is justified solely by its theme. The Way of All Flesh is the proving ground of the scientific heresies that Butler was developing, during the long years of the novel's gestation, in his three books attacking Darwin—Life and Habit, Evolution Old and New, and Luck or Cunning. The course and implications of Butler's excessive anti-Darwinism precipitate some of the most extreme modern revulsions against the time-consciousness of paternity. In his theory of the "survival of the fittest," Charles Darwin meant his "natural selection" to be made from adaptations first, which were favorable, and second, into which purpose entered to only a small extent. Evolution depended upon variations in the organism that were largely accidental, fortuitous, and mindless; and it favored the continuance and permanence of species rather than abrupt and broad change. Butler—hearkening back to the eighteenth-century formulations of Erasmus Darwin, Buffon, and Lamarck—wished to reintroduce "cunning" or purpose into organic development, as a substitute for Darwin's "luck." He argued that organisms, especially those higher on the evolutionary scale, have an intelligent perception of their immediate environment, and persistently work to turn to their own account any slight variations that would promulgate a modus vivendi. With this move, evolution becomes as much a matter of specializing consciousness as of modifying physical organs, and this evolving sentience increases the organism's flexibility so much that it can survive even unfavorable variations. What evolves, then, is not merely the family line connecting organism to organism (the parent and offspring in genetic descent), but 47

Subverting the Father also the organism-plus-environment in their systemic relation. This is to say that the space of evolutionary survival is as significant, and perhaps more so, as its time. In spatial interaction the organism plus its environment constitutes a closed, cybernetic system that corrects itself through trial and error—operating very much like mental process—and thereby frees itself, relatively speaking, from its inheritance from the past. 8 It is not solely the conscious mind, however, that Butler would place at the center of evolution. T h e second distinctive aspect of his anti-Darwinism is his definition of the unconscious as the hiding place of good, but forgotten instincts. Instinct, which is a racial memory passed through the generations, becomes so familiar that through habit it drops out into the unconscious. Nevertheless, instincts—latent, charged, powerful, and absolutely to be trusted—may be reactivated through a bypassing of the previous generation in order to retrieve an older inheritance, one bestowed by the great-grandfather rather than the father. This is most likely to occur, Butler argues, in situations where the organism finds itself u p against the radically new, unprepared for by the father and the immediate past. We note at once how the two tenets of Butler's thought combine to liberate the organism from the imperatives of a genealogy: either the organism with its present resources interacts within its own space, or it reaches far back in time for the unconscious, instinctual deposits of a common and ancient gene pool. It is surely true that Butler's need for parental disengagement was as much biographical as theoretical (indeed, one of his chief incentives for writing at all was the displeasure it would cause his father 9 ), and his revolt against the overwhelming Darwinism of his age was just one act in his 48

Precursors continuing rebellion against all authority he deemed patriarchal. Still, when applied to the reality of Ernest Pontifex's literary life, the question Butler raises makes good, human sense: why should Ernest remain subjected to the iron wills of two such attenuated parents as the pious, hypocritical Christina and the timid, tyrannical Theobald? Set upon a path from the family parsonage to the stifling clericalism of Cambridge, Ernest can only repeat the father. But let him listen to the Continuing Evolutionary Personality (Butler's substitute for the authoritative father-God of Christianity) and he may yet save himself: " T h i s conscious self of yours, Ernest, is a prig—begotten of prigs and trained in priggishness; I will not allow it to shape your actions. . . . Obey me, your true self, and things will go tolerably well for you, but only listen to that outward and visible old husk of yours which is called your father, and I will rend you in pieces even unto the third and fourth generation as one who has hated God; for I, Ernest, am the God who made you." This prescription for self-begetting is carried out by a narrative that subjects Ernest to large doses of violent shock. First, his environment must be abruptly altered: throw him into prison, deprive him of the present money-at-hand from his father, withhold all knowledge of the substantial legacy left him by Aunt Alethea, and eject him into Ashpit Place among the destitute poor. Second, his unconscious must be tapped and made to yield its riches. Not, certainly, the legacy of the petty, circumscribed father and grandfather, b u t that of the vitally resourceful great-grandfather—old John Pontifex, artist-carpenter-musician, who faced approaching death by having steps built u p his garden wall, so that he might watch the sun set every remaining evening. 49

Subverting the Father T h e very unlinear formula of the narrative, much approved by the narrator Overton, is to plague the young man with so much destructive experience, while blessing him with the successful retrieval of the surviving and thriving evolutionary self, that his survival must be viewed as a rebirth. W h a t Ernest learns from misfortune—empathy, real evangelical fervor, tailoring, and bookselling—makes him almost literally a new man, selfbegotten. Furthermore, he guiltlessly uses his postponed legacy to buy himself a future of freedom from family roles; he gets rid of his drunken proletarian wife, puts his children in a robustly healthy foster home (thereby protecting them from the affliction of the blood father), and gets himself the unencumbered life of a traveler and writer. (I have always thought that this must be the part that so endeared Butler to George Bernard Shaw, when others were shunning him.) Fatherhood, Butler says, is merely biological and should not be permitted any metaphorical heightening. One needn't kill the father, merely forget him. T i m e is not a guaranteed continuity, b u t rather a series of non sequiturs; and by divesting oneself of one's immediate past, one gets a present informed with a potential for novelty. T h e refusal to hoard the past and parcel out one's pennies to the future leaves human beings with a gloriously wasteful present to tease out of its riches; and this new valorization of the present, distinctly at odds with the Victorians' prevailing Christiancapitalist ethic, opens new possibilities for representation by later novelists. Character will be defined outside of, and as an alternate to, its destiny within historical time, since genealogy is not a sufficient designator of identity, and one can always begin again and again. Other connections replace the time-worn familial ones:

5°

Precursors the fictional character may find himself relating in space to a brotherhood of equals, to the biological community, or to the cosmos itself. He may exercise the powers of mind over matter, as Van Veen does, to dislodge the memory that is merely "a stereotype or a tear-sheet"; or, with the inhabitants of Macondo all variously plagued with amnesia, he may respond to forgetting with a comic, picaresque resourcefulness. If memory is of any value at all, it is a rare and privileged one (for Nabokov as well as Butler) which rescues the past out of sequence, and thus contributes the new constituents of the new person who remembers. The prototypical treatment of this modern theme, of course, is Remembrance of Things Past, a book which, I confess, has ever seemed to me to be more about space than time, more about forgetting than remembering. Once the young Marcel is deprived by his mother of his goodnight kiss, he loses the sense of an identity that continues through time, the very kind of identity that the willful, voluntary memory constructs for the writing of memoirs. Conscientious rather than instinctive, this memory reduces past reality to a habit so familiar and ordinary that its unique particularities are forgotten in the recall. It is Marcel's involuntary memory, triggered by sensation, that lets in those startling discontinuities between past and present, which offer to consciousness the old as new. All the persons whom Marcel calls forth are changelings, fragmented in the space of his mind, without those convenient life histories that would refer their various, multiple manifestations to a single, unifying essence of personality. In his search for some law of relation that would center the disparate Odettes, Swanns, Saint-Loups, and Albertines of his mind, Marcel discovers that what the habitual memory would desig51

Subverting the Father nate as deceptions are—in the adjacent and better reality of space—the side-by-side materializations of human character's nearly infinite potentiality. 10 Surely, the book that the aging Marcel leaves his library to write will provide the account of what the real memory has relearned; like the other works of this study (with the exception, always, of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks), it will negotiate a space in narrative for forgetting and self-begetting. More than most others at the end of the last century, Friedrich Nietzsche was aware of the new coming into the world; and eager to bring it to birth, he recommended forgetfulness as a "form of robust health." " T h e r e could be no happiness, n o cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness." This is Nietzsche's forceful expression of the positive within the indirect negations of historical time that we have seen in the novels of Bronte, Melville, and Butler. What must be forgotten, Nietzsche claims, is "this long chain of the will"— an apt designation for the genealogical imperative. Indeed, all of Nietzsche's highly metaphorical rhetoric lends itself readily to our locating his central theme as the extension through time of the paternal promise: " T o breed an animal with the right to make promises— is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?" This dyspeptic man, this animal who cannot "have done" with anything, is able "to stand security for his own future" because he has an active desire not to rid himself of the past, "a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will."11 Nietzsche's appeal for a remedy to willed continuity echoes through the twentieth-century novel, and the 52

Precursors reverberations will be analyzed throughout this study. First, however, I want to consider a major literary work that presents the finest defense of the legitimacy of linearity. Everything we know of his life and works suggests that Thomas Mann could represent the line in its most admirable apotheosis. T h e book is Buddenhrooks, and Nietzsche, unknowingly and in the same place as above, provides a precise enumeration of its enabling assumptions: T o ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. Man must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does. This anatomy of the memory and the will—which is the evolutionary climax of man under the protection of the genealogical imperative—reaches its most composed culmination in Thomas Mann. T o that novelist, who preeminently "stands security," we now turn, as to the serenity before the storm.

53

2 "Links in a Chain": Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks

Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann's first novel, is patently a matter of fathers and sons. In tracing the decline of a family dynasty through forty years and four generations, Mann fixes his focus in each generation upon the male heir who is destined to assume the leadership of the family and its firm. Within the novel the line of descent begins with old Johann Buddenbrook, whose physical vigor and decisiveness assure his amiable integration in "the jolly present." Johann's son Jean, softening into sentimental self-consciousness, tends to be inept in business, pompous and pious in family matters. Jean's son Thomas is fiercely eager to eliminate any personal disharmonies that might frustrate his control of the family's fortunes, but his dedication yields only exhausted alienation. Thomas' son, the last male Buddenbrook, is the sickly and withdrawn Hanno, whose great passion is reserved for neither family nor firm but for music. With his death at age fifteen, the business is liquidated and the family itself is reduced to a sad collection of widows and spinsters. Buddenbrooks is a novel, then, whose theme coincides with an empathy for the sons, each of whom learns how uncommonly difficult it is to live within a family dynasty and how increasingly burdensome is the legacy he inherits from the father. Yet, to move from Mann's artistic rendition to his personal perspectives is to shift 54

Buddenbrooks from the despair of the sons to the joys of the father. The familial loyalty that crushes his characters is, for Mann himself, expansive and inspirational. Precisely where they feel most at the mercy of, enslaved to, and negated by a mandated coherence—within a seamless and orderly descent—Thomas Mann seems most consciously, consistently, and comfortably at home. This generous equivocality in Mann, this latent theme of the fathers beneath a manifest theme of the sons, produces in Buddenbrooks an ideally full treatment of the genealogical imperative: it celebrates the most admirable manifestations of paternity and, at the same time, defines the areas of filial discontent. As a system of constraints, it has direct relevance not only for the sons within its narrative but also for the novelists who succeed Mann in this study. Delivering both the explicit law and its implicit transgressions, Buddenbrooks serves as an orthodoxy that generates heterodoxy within the logic of the novel's form. It must therefore be read for what it cannot say as well as for what it does say, for its displacements and silences, for all that which is muted by Mann's "fathering" postulate, and will be given back its voice by Lawrence, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Marquez. Because Mann's paternal concerns prevail in his life and art alike—because, to be explicit, "fathering" is the metaphor embedded in Mann's genetic and mimetic connections of life with art—it would be well first to establish his existential preferences, which will be seen later to dominate his aesthetic choices. Of Thomas Mann, Carlos Fuentes has said truly that he was the "last great writer who could legitimately acclaim the conditions of his culture as universal categories."1 In 1901, ethnocentricism was not yet a familiar charge; and, at the age of twenty-six, writing his first 55

"Links in a Chain" novel from out of his autobiographical experience, Mann would not think to question the normative values of a reality engendered by a boyhood lived in a mercantile town in Germany, in Europe. More importantly, Mann never questions the legitimacy of a mimetic contract between art and the real world, the assumption that life, more or less easefully, "fathers" art. Buddenbrooks was conceived by Mann as primarily a representation of reality rather than as a fictional illusion, as more found than founded, and what has been found is natural and immediately verifiable in the real world. His materials are given to observation and memory (the people, scenes, and stories from his youth), as is their arrangement (a theme and plot of disintegration). The interesting result for the author, of this conviction that life is responsible for art, is that he can disappear.2 In Buddenbrooks Mann posits for himself neither authorial freedom nor authorial presence; he is, rather, the faceless and poised narrator of events that have already occurred and passed. Only formally does Buddenbrooks make certain claims to "universal categories" of mankind's history; at the level of content, it is firmly situated in history, as the end of an epoch, as life as it had been lived by Mann's father and grandfather rather than by his own generation. This pastness of the mimesis, I am convinced, accounts in a large way for the appeal of the realistic novel to a critic like Georg Lukacs: it is because the past is always more firmly established in the historical consciousness than the present, because it can be revived at a classical "middle distance" by an imagination unfettered by quotidian concerns, that Mann may accompany Tolstoy, Goethe, and Eliot among Lukacs' great "epic realists."3 The mimetic obligation seems to have been a weight56

Buddenbrooks iess one for Mann, who sought in life a grand integration between himself and the world, between the collective past and his own unique future. His daughter testifies that his decisions and actions were invariably governed by the "twin star of desire and duty," and that he had such a "near fanatic liking for uniformity and continuity" that she was thrown into a considerable panic every time he remodeled his moustache. 4 This suggests a rare poise within the universe, one shared by only the best Buddenbrook, old Johann, and unknown to his descendants. It is a poise so unselfconscious that when Mann—this middle-class, democratic German Protestant—requested an interview with the aristocratic, conservative Italian Pope Pius X I I , he could say afterwards: "it seemed completely natural to me when I took leave of him, to bend my knee and kiss his ring. I knelt to the ages." 5 Mann's sense of temporal congruence is part of his general faith in the law of the whole, whereby the self may be accommodated within a totality that is "natural" and "legitimate." T h e conventional oppositions do not pertain when, within a measured regularity, neither collective memory nor individual desire need be sacrificed. Perhaps this is why, for Mann, the mimetic assumption that "life fathers art" coincides, rather than conflicts, with the genetic assumption that "the author fathers art." He has affirmed, autobiographically, that "in truth, I love order, love it as nature, as a profoundly legitimate necessity, as the inner fitness and clear correspondence of a productive plan of life." 6 Reality thus provides not resistance but collaboration for the artist: his "productive plan" exhibits a "fitness" and "correspondence" with the universal "ages" that he reveres. Both postures, the mimetic and the genetic, are pater57

"Links in a Chain" nal; however, Mann's description of the genesis of the artwork—how it is "authorized" by the author—is, more instructively, dynastic. Other authors have spoken of the "creative moment" in which art is born from its lifesource, moments in which the artist is supended in a dimensionless present, within a fleeting transcendence of temporal process, while the world finds its way into the poetic imagination. Mann knows n o such genetic moment. Unlike James or Proust or Joyce (who typically locate the genesis in an overheard phrase, a fleeting sense impression, a blazing epiphany), Mann requires for his art a lengthier gestation that is, curiously, paternal. He promotes the notion that the material of art must first be earned by life, that it accumulates steadily and stealthily over the years, in the thick crowd of things as well as in private introspection, and is only very tardily brought to birth as art: "A work of art must have long roots in my life, secret connections must lead from it to early childhood, if I am to consider myself entitled to it, if I am to believe in the legitimacy of what I am doing." 7 T h e legality that is a consequence of length, of a succession within a duration that is mediated by continuity 8 —this is a nearly perfect formulation of all patrilineal projects at their most ideal. In the father's dutiful desire to legitimatize and give title to his progeny resides the value, for the individual son, of an inheritance and a legacy, a mandated past and future. In the case of Thomas Mann, the father's guarantee to his heirs is analogous to the author's authorization of his work; because Mann respected and loved his heritage from the world of the fathers, his Buddenbrooks remains, unerringly, the son of the father who named it. And Mann was very firm about his fathering. At one 58

Buddenbrooks point when his publishers, aghast at the size of this unmarketable "triple decker," wanted to shorten it, Mann protested that "its length was its essential characteristic, not to be laid hands on lightly."9 The young authorfather knew what he was about. The dynastic ambition needs to be delineated and justified over a greater stretch of life and print than is ordinarily found in the typical Bildungsroman. There, a mimesis of a single career might well evoke charges of chanciness and particularity that would hardly be forthcoming when the proving ground is six hundred pages and four generations. Furthermore, it is in its length that Buddenbrooks is able to manifest formally the absolute imperatives of narrative genealogy. Early in the novel a Buddenbrook father, in no uncertain terms, lays down the law to his straying daughter: "we are not free, separate, and independent entities, but like the links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed the way, by following the straight and narrow path, not looking to right or left."10 This is an adequate description of not only the Buddenbrook paternal philosophy but also the linear structure which in Buddenbrooks welds the end to the beginning and the past to the future. The book's subtitle, The Decline of a Family, pronounced at the novel's inception, is a patriarchal curse that is never revoked: there will be no escape from prophecy for any "free, separate, and independent entities" in this particular narrative, where everything is referred to the laws of family and decline. If the Buddenbrooks do not cast off their paternal chains, it is because they have been forged as much by their authorial father as by their fictional ones. The singular element has no life independent of its lineal placement; it cannot survive intact 59

"Links in a Chain" outside of any line, familial or narrative, that has been overdetermined by the single governing principle of the father. It will perhaps be easier to comprehend the effects of patrilinearity upon structure if we have before us, as an analogy, a more familiar anthropological model. In Kinship and Culture Francis K. Hsu offers an hypothesis (largely acceptable to the other ethnologists represented in the volume) that specifies the values and behavior encouraged by a genealogical emphasis within the extended family. Drastically summarized, Hsu's theory of family structures advances the following insights pertinent to Buddenbrooks. Hsu's fundamental term is the "dyad," which signifies a preferential relationship between two members of the same family. Of the eight possible dyads (husband/wife, father/son, mother/son, mother/daughter, father/daughter, brother/brother, brother/sister, sister/sister), one generally takes precedence over the others. Thus elevated, the "dominant dyad" tends to magnify, modify, reduce, or even eliminate other dyads in the kinship group. To each dyad there belong logical, typical, and intrinsic attitudes and modes of behavior; the dominant dyad, however, will exhibit "dominant attributes" that prevail over and give shape to all other relations, social as well as familial. The father/son dyad, predominant in every Buddenbrook generation except the last, promotes these four dominant attributes: i. continuity (the condition of being, or the attitude of desiring to be, an unbroken sequence, or connected with others); 2. inclusiveness (the act of incorporating or the attitude of wishing to be incorporated); 60

Buddenbrooks 3. authority (personal power that commands and enforces obedience, or the condition of being under such power); 4. asexuality (the condition of having no connection with sex).11 These attributes are so obviously and pervasively at work throughout Buddenbrooks that the briefest review of their applications should suffice as an introduction to their less apparent manifestations within the novel's structure. Father/son dominance in Lubeck's burgher society is perhaps nowhere so evident as in the choice of profession and the making of marriages. In both areas, the fathers decide for the sons, and the sons agree with the fathers. Here is a typical maneuver: "His father had tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out to him the daughter of the wealthy Kroger, who could bring the firm a splendid marriage portion. He had accepted the situation with alacrity" (43). It is understood that the new couple will produce offspring, but that there is to be no frank, public display of sexual affection; displays of affection are reserved for one's inlaws, and thus furnish the means by which the "older and younger generations crossed hands in the dance of life" (70). "The union, to be frank, could hardly be called a love match" (43) is a pronouncement that accurately describes more than one generation of Buddenbrook marriages. Passion is to be shunned by the continuous family, because it fosters—in the disinherited sons Gotthold and Christian, and in Hanno—modes of behavior diametrically opposed to father/son attributes: actions, that is, which advance discontinuity, exclusiveness, freedom, and sexuality. Once dowries and business records "good enough to frame" have gained the out61

"Links in a Chain siders admittance into the family, they enjoy the family's protection for life, even when they cause public scandal, as in the cases of Toni's two husbands and her daughter Erika's husband, where divorce is the last resort. This gathering-in tendency is manifested throughout society, even as class distinctions are recognized and maintained. T h e men of each generation are more united in their attitudes toward authority than divided by their sense of social injustice. T h e confrontation between the burgher merchant-king and the workers during the Revolution of 1848 is a case in point. Although Herr Consul Buddenbrook is angered by the "open and unheard-of interruption of the regular order" (the streetlights are unlit), he addresses the men with the easy humor and secure command of a superior: "Now then, all of you, what is the meaning of this foolishness?" As several men immediately remove their caps, the Consul reduces them all to laughter at the expense of their leader, whom he sends in search of his father-in-law's carriage (159). W h e n superiority is not disguised and subordination is not disgruntled, authority can generally be benevolent, continuity prevails within complementary relationships, inclusiveness provides security, and sexuality is uninfluential. It remains the best of all possible patrilineal worlds. W h a t we seek to comprehend, however, is the effect upon form of such a father/son dominance. Do these genealogical emphases operate as beneficently at the level of structure in Buddenbrooks} There is a full and laudatory description of the novel's formal structure from Erich Heller, who may well be considered Mann's ideal reader. Here is Professor Heller's answer: Buddenbrooks is a story without surprises. W h a t is surprising is the subtle art with which the young 62

Buddenbrooks writer manages the gradual illumination of inevitability through an organically continuous sequence of shocks of recognition. . . . Its characters are in the undisturbed possession of their fates. No time is lost, no reality is in suspense, and no act is gratuitous. Indeed, the Buddenbrooks in their decline come to doubt all certainties, but their author envisages all their doubts against no uncertain background: a firm order of reality within which the human person occupies a definable place. Hence, the fate of the individual, what he does and what happens to him, is only the dramatic unfolding of what he was meant to be. Fate and character, therefore, are indissolubly one. Thus the novel, in all its unsparing pessimism and skeptical irony, conveys a sense of meaningful order existing not only in and through the aesthetic organization of the written work but in the world itself.12 Heller's description encapsulates what I have been trying in more circuitous ways to establish: that Mann's narrative enterprise is founded in his willingness to assume the authority and responsibility usually reserved to a patriarch; that the plot, also a respecter of first causes, unfolds obediently to a conclusion that has been implied from its beginning; and that against the fact of the disintegration of a family line, Mann reaffirms and reconstitutes the genealogical principle through the tight integration of his story line. Thus far, we agree. But what about Heller's adulation of Mann? Is there something too pious about it? Should we, as Heller does elsewhere, applaud the "enthusiasm of logicality" that informs Mann's plot of decline? Is Mann to be congratulated for "daring to be traditional," or because he "spontaneously resolved to preserve the continuity of 63

"Links in a Chain" form as the symbol and promise of something absolute and indestructible?" 11 Every resounding success story has its own pressing negatives. T h e r e is, for instance, the other side of dominance, which interests Hsu—what values and activities, he asks, are displaced by a father/ son emphasis? If Heller's study fails to yield greater significance for an inquiry into the rules of narrativity, it is because its clear empathy, which serves so well the cause of descriptive explication, retards the readingacross-the-grain required for a structural analysis. Heller is too innocent. He seems to share Mann's assumption that reality is always available, that one can be in direct contact with life, and he ignores the fact that acts of perception and consciousness, which are never valueneutral, involve losses as well as gains. Nor is Heller as astute as one would wish on the difficult question of intentionality and form; surely, form is neither "spontaneous," nor wholly "chosen," nor the rational consequence of Mann's reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but something more fundamental to Mann's existence, something beyond his conscious control. Form has its own psychological bases and ideological consequences, and D. H. Lawrence is much closer than Heller to an appreciation of this when he says, "it seems to me that this craving for form is the outcome, not of artistic conscience, b u t of a certain attitude toward life. For form is not a personal thing like style. It is impersonal like logic." 14 One would want to examine very critically, then, the following statement that precedes Heller's account of the Buddenbrooks story-line: "Thomas Mann simply knotted more tightly the old net of the storyteller." This is not the innocent procedure Heller assumes it to be. Put as bluntly as possible, tightening the knot 64

Buddenbrooks of story means putting the screws to the progeny of narrative. A linear structure that is forever legitimatizing itself by locking its elements into archaeological, logical, and teleological relations dictates that any definition oi singular identity must necessarily fall between the narrative's inheritance and its destiny; there is no existence for the singular, independent of the story line. One can agree that Mann's emplotment is indeed the battle against entropic disorder that Heller claims it to be; but beyond this, it is also one way of overdetermining the reading of the book, of forcing the reader to proceed "straight through," since each sequence is determined by its placement within the totality. Thus, not only does Mann halt the proliferation of possibilities in the book's own future, but he also reduces the possible number of critical interpretations of its literary phenomena. One might consider Mann's presentation of character as an example. In Buddenbrooks, characterization is never individual, but familial; recurrence, rather than occurrence, governs the selection and arrangement of the character's physical, social, and mental qualities. Essentially, each quality fits into a genealogical chain that is analogous in its pattern to the generational effects of the Buddenbrook tradition upon the sons—-all-sustaining for Johann, troublesome for Jean, despairing for Thomas, and wholly onerous for Hanno. The reader learns in process that definition of character depends upon succession, and that succession is to be construed as a comparison between generations that will eventually assume the power of genetic fatality. "We would not be who we are without those who went before us" is a statement crucial to the structural reading of identity in Buddenbrooks, and I think I can indicate, by ab65

"Links in a Chain" breviated enumeration, just how narrative order circumscribes character. In each case, there is a category of description that recurs, and also a predictable succession from best to worst. Under the category of physicality, the decline from health into sickness. Johann enjoys sound sleep and keen awakening; Jean paces the floor of his bedroom long into the night; Thomas is subject to heavy, unspecified fatigue: Hanno is a hopeless insomniac with a gross array of physical debilities. Under the category of consciousness, the decline from intuition to self-consciousness. Johann is too spontaneous to bother writing in the family journal at all; Jean, mixing God and finance indiscriminately, writes interminable, self-justifying passages; Thomas, assiduous even in decline, briefly annotates births, deaths, offices, properties; Hanno's sole entry is the double line, signifying termination, which he places by his name. Under the category of relation to nature, the decline from extroversion into introspection. Johann heedlessly trims his hedges to his own specifications; Jean dreams about lolling beneath an underbrush gone wild; Thomas, near death, voices an exhausted preference for the maternal embrace of the sea over the paternal challenge of mountains; Hanno incarnates in his music the most torrential and monstrous aspects of nature. Under the category of the making of marriages, the decline from duty chosen to duty avoided. Johann marries first for love, and as a widower chooses a second wife as companionable as she is wealthy; Jean marries and respects the heiress his father pointed him towards; Thomas, having abandoned as inappropriate his first sweetheart from the flower shop, is "unwilling to delve too deep" into just how much the rumor of Gerda 66

Buddenbrooks Arnoldsen's dowry triggered his affection; Hanno will never be a bridegroom, and his only love is reserved for another adolescent schoolboy. Under the category of class distinction, the decline from judgment to indiscrimination. Johann is a natural aristocrat, with a metaphysical certainty about his own superiority; Jean dismisses the revolutionaries, but cannot make the proper distinctions between business matters and affairs of conscience; Thomas only uncomfortably mingles with his townsmen and employees, for whom he is an object of gossip; Hanno weeps inconsolably over the story of the wagoner "who gets up at three from his bed of straw," rejecting his Aunt Toni's complacent rejoinder, "Why, of course he does. That's why he's a wagoner." This is not to suggest that each Buddenbrook does not enjoy his place in the sun before he recedes into the shadows. My point, rather, is this: that there exists in Buddenbrooks no principle of impedance that would block these genealogical tracings. All character is in context; every male heir arrives and departs his scene with reference to what has preceded and what will follow him. Character is thus never viewed in the multiplicity of its aspects or in the disarray of its potential. All such chains in Buddenbrooks unfold their length freely and unobstructed: the line of story never halts or doubles back on itself, never gets distracted into detours, never jumps the track .to go gathering flowers. Granting, then, that Mann's is a narrative intelligence —that narrative order for him is not illusory or arbitrary or questionable—we must nevertheless consider, against his intentions, the unacknowledged values that inhere in a preference for making story this powerfully ascendant. The strategy of story is always toward the 67

"Links in a Chain" subjugation or the discrete, local element (image, scene, character, dialogue, description, and so on) to a regular and progressive forward movement. By restricting the mobility of the element, story reduces its potential for nonlinear combinations, thus protecting itself from the subversive complexities that the dispersed element would introduce to frustrate its linear project. T h e ambition of story is to eliminate risks to its own autonomy through the setting u p of limits beyond which the element cannot stray into alternative relations of adjacency, juxtaposition, reversal, or repetition. Narrative supremacy depends upon such mastering strategies, essentially antierotic, which constitute an aesthetic defense against desire, against the random couplings encouraged by passion or play. 15 In Buddenbrooks Mann is making his formal claims for the superiority of fathering over coupling, of paternal procreation over sexual recreation, of duty over passion and work over play, of order over friction. These artistic acts spring from Mann's unwillingness to risk the discontinuous and resistant in the novel. As defenses against disorder, they permit us to read for narrative structure the lesson of the fathers: that familial coherence in narrative is inevitably a consequence of voluntary deprivation. Let's see, then, how deprivation works in this novel; let's read what is not there. T h e sense of sovereignty implies a principle of hierarchy: the father is supreme because he can discriminate, judge, and choose. Making the proper distinctions, Mann is ever in imperturbable control: his heavy Romantic irony hits one target and no other, allusions do not radiate beyond their intended significance, dialogue is unambiguous, description is explicit. But, above all else, Mann has exercised his prerogative to determine 68

Buddenbrooks what can be discarded and what must be saved. It is almost as if he thought of Buddenbrooks as a time capsule, destined to institutionalize and make intelligible to future generations only the most precisely characteristic aspects of an epoch. Nevertheless, as a monument to a social reality that has passed, Buddenbrooks is surprisingly unhospitable to anything not directly connected with the family's concerns. It lacks the capaciousness, the messiness, of panorama. T h e reader cannot go to this novel to learn the grain import business in the way he can pick u p whaling in Moby Dick; he cannot find here the Revolution of 1848 as it would have been recreated by Stendhal, Tolstoy, or Thackeray; he is not, as in Balzac and Dickens, treated to lively characters from all stations of lite. Fictional humanity from outside the family appear only as functions: they visit, serve, and marry Buddenbrooks, or provide them with the stuff of gossip. T h e reader knows that there are balls and men's clubs somewhere on the periphery, but the sociality of burgher life is solidly located in the family home—in its traditions of the first and second breakfasts, the ladies "Jerusalem evenings" of salvation and embroidery, the weekly children's day, and the Thursday night dinners for the relatives. T h e reader knows that offices and warehouses, political meetings and the Bourse exist—but only as they impinge upon the family, as in their frequent financial inventories or in the conferral of public titles (Consul, Senator) upon Buddenbrook males. Nowhere are there represented the complex interminglings and intersections that would suggest the vastness of the social conglomerate, or the multiplying and pluralizing of connections u p to the point at which perfect chaos approaches perfect order. Rather, everything that is admitted is decreed to have a 69

"Links in a Chain" single linear relation of relevance. And, in Buddenbrooks, it is this linearity that supplies the mimetic illusion; it is this reduction to patrilinear order—this deprivation—which we have become accustomed to designating as "realistic." T o realize that "realism" in the novel is not found, but founded on the exercise of formal choice—choices against, as well as choices for—is to recognize a procedure in which we are all implicated, one so habitual and familiar as to have gone largely unnoticed. We may undeceive ourselves specifically by looking at what—in the either lor punctuation typical of Western thought—the patrilinear structure disowns. T o n i Buddenbrook is an excellent instance of the narrative disinheritance of character. She is actually quite like her brother Thomas (they both actively violate their individuality in devoted service to the family), yet Thomas' struggles are presented as tragic-heroic, whereas Toni's are comic-pathetic. T o n i is proscribed in a comedy of circularity by the narrative investment in a tragedy of linearity. As the Buddenbrook "dear child" all the way into her old age, she is never permitted the luxury of growing u p and learning from her experiences. Thus, she is condemned to her three marital recommencements, all of which demonstrate the grotesque and burlesque aspects of a stagnating repetition. If Toni's time is fixed on one point, it is because both the family line and the narrative line have left her orphaned. In a family where legitimacy descends only through the male heirs, her sex disqualifies her. Powerless, she can attain n o maturity or individualized identity, because her only legacy is the reductive one of bringing into the family a properly qualified male and producing another male heir. Failing this inherited 70

Buddenbrooks duty, she is as good as dead to the genealogical Buddenbrooks; and once she is outside the family destiny, the narrative structure confirms her inconsequentiality by rendering her "unlinear," or comic. T h e fact is, that had the family fortunes been put into Toni's keeping, she would have sustained a matriarchal role much more wholeheartedly than Thomas played his out as patriarch; however, her pride and rages, which could have qualified her for aggressive success, could hardly be accommodated by a narrative line committed to decline. Thus, for all the waste of her human potential, T o n i cannot be allowed her tragedy—she remains the "silly goose" of comic relief. Moreover, there is no way in this novel for T o n i to be beside her brother. Integration is always lineal, never lateral; one is never side-by-side with another of one's own generation. (The reader of Buddenbrooks gets a strong sense, despite the fact of the matter, that every son is an only child.) Affiliation within a generation— between husband and wife, as well as between siblings —would detract too much from the paternal/filial relations between generations. T h e rules prohibiting social intercourse between contemporaries are readily apparent in the narrative handling of Christian and Hanno. T h e reader soon becomes aware that Thomas' younger brother Christian is leading a life that the structure might well offer as a counter text or shadow commentary to Thomas' own dominance, b u t it is never developed. Christian's aversion to business, his artistic sensitivity, his taste for gay life and loose women, his introspection —none of these alternative choices is allowed to comment on the narrative's first purposes. Christian is, quite literally, shunted aside by the story (he is sent away for long, unspecified tours of duty in foreign businesses), 71

"Links in a Chain" and when he returns to Thomas' taunts on his inadequacies, it is as a wayward child might return to the father who always knows best. Each scene they play together is a conversion of brother/brother to father/son. Even though Christian has the potential for being the most complex Buddenbrook of all, that very complexity makes him an embarrassment to the structural dynasty of the novel. His liaison with the courtesan remains unlegalized, their children are bastardized, and Christian himself is ultimately put away in an asylum. Thomas' son Hanno, on the contrary, comes alive only in withdrawal, and is one half of the novel's most passionate couple. The other half is the impoverished aristocrat, Count Kai. Together, the two schoolboys find a hole in time where, undeterred by school bells and dinner bells and bedtime curfews, they create a time in contrast to the daily rhythms of Liibeck families. They lose themselves in Kai's inventive tales of legendary heroes, in a substitute past from which they can inherit a tradition that embodies their own sensitivities. Their unrestrained responses to each other (Kai kissing Hanno's hands at his deathbed) are a direct affront to the paternal sense of decorum and dignity, in both Thomas Buddenbrook and Thomas Mann. Neither substitutive nor corrective, their relationship, with its timid overtones of covert homosexuality, is viewed by Mann as one more symptom of the weakening of the family fiber. The Buddenbrooks are going to terminate with a little artist who succumbs to defective genes within the hereditary strain; Kai is necessarily a nonproductive item in that main drama. Sexuality is a very real threat to Mann's sense of orderly narrative, but because it is at the root of the other thematic subversions of father/son dominance—exclu72

Buddenbrooks siveness, freedom, discontinuity—its structural relevance seems less apparent. T h e whole taboo on lateral relationships is founded upon a fear of sexuality—heterosexuality in the husband/wife dyad, incest between brother and sister, and homosexuality between peers. In this novel the asexuality of each generational member guarantees, also, that details will not touch; where the law is distance, and not intercourse, there may be no erotic clustering of dispersed elements, no overlapping or entanglement. Anything that might advance the dangers of sexuality is isolated, made a note of, and passed by in silence. Introspection is especially hard hit, as a "curious and useless preoccupation," which tends to make one "unsteady, hare-brained, and incapable." One wonders at what interesting conflicts might have arisen if Thomas had been allowed to carry over into subsequent action his transcendent experience of reading Schopenhauer that one afternoon. One would appreciate overhearing Johann's musings upon his first financially undistinguished marriage, especially since it is known that it was the happiest year in the life of Buddenbrooks' happiest man. W h a t kind of magnetizing attraction might have existed, oedipally and musically, between H a n n o and his mother, who share the darkblue shadows beneath their eyes? Neither Thomas nor the reader ever gets beyond the door where his wife Gerda and the lieutenant spend long afternoons in musical duet, but what if real adultery, rather than the easily dismissed spiritual infidelity, had impinged upon the Buddenbrook history? One has the sense from these silences that new nodes and constellations of meaning might have formed throughout Buddenbrooks, except that this is precisely the kind of structure that Mann would have perceived as anarchic.

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"Links in a Chain" It is typical of Mann's perspicacious eye, and altogether to his credit, that he will include the anarchic detail, even while excluding it from his structural projects. In two powerful scenes centering upon Hanno at the piano, he even offers the alternate paradigm to the book's structure. It is the music of "that old rogue" Richard Wagner (as Mann referred to him all his life) that holds Hanno in its thrall, and, specifically, it is the free mobility and combinative potential of Wagner's leitmotif. Here is a recurrence that refuses to serve the linear uses of succession—a repetition for novelty's sake that is disorderly and unpredictable. His father Thomas finds the music maddeningly cacophonic, but Hanno fanatically worships "this worthless trifle, this scrap of melody, this brief, childish harmonic invention only a bar and a half in length" (588). Strange harmonies displace the single melody, harmonies that can be read forward or backward, and can be played "crab-fashion." Hanno's musical performance, of his own composition before the family on his eighth birthday, is the closest he will ever come to a direct assault upon his father and the entire Buddenbrook tradition. It is a performance infused with erotic rapture, overtly paralleling the rhythms of orgasm: there is a "retardation and accentuation," a "suddenly introduced pianissimo," a swell and sweep broken by discord and dissonance, a repeated denial of resolution, and ultimately the joy of submission. It is the most erotic passage of this long novel, and the head of the Buddenbrook family is not amused. Mann may look over the abyss, but he won't step into it. Unlike Emily Bronte, he knows what a Catherine and Heathcliff can do to the regular and moral progress that he believed was basic to life and literature. What Thomas Mann, like his hero Thomas, would 74

Buddenbrooks seek to avert is the onslaught of the new. The enfeebled Hanno is merely a symbolic herald of the disorder coming into the world, but the novel also presents a more immediate threat—the Hagenstroms. An upstart family without roots or traditions or family coffers, the Hagenstroms are the new bourgeoisie, the shakers and breakers who are ready to explode into the future as fast as the new industrial technology will allow. All the Buddenbrook prizes fall eventually to them: the brash sons eclipse timid Hanno at school, Julie and her sisters marry far better than does Toni, Hermann succeeds to Thomas' seat in the senate, and the family snaps up the Buddenbrook mansion when it is mournfully put on the market. Only once does Thomas try to imitate Hermann's daring speculations on the market, and it costs the family a small fortune. Prudently defending their small gains and privileged position the rest of the time, the Buddenbrooks are the least equipped for a geometries of expansion; the organizational and technological future belongs to the Hagenstroms.16 Mann was accustomed to refer to himself as the artist afflicted with Burgherlichkeit; he has, accordingly, given us in theme and structure a burgher novel. It represents a conflict within the ruling class itself, a battle among capitalists, between the family firm and the entrepreneur. Mann recognizes the deadening effects on the Buddenbrooks of a life given over entirely to self-control ("the closed fist" by which Aschenbach also lives), and he sees clearly that the Buddenbrooks have divorced their "capital" and "income" from the labor value of wages and salaries, so that they enjoy no productive relation to their work. On the other hand, Mann fears the crass energies of the Hagenstroms, whose acquisitive activities, loosed from the retarding bonds of family 75

"Links in a Chain" tradition, will never obey the limits set by grace and morality. Mann's rear-guard action here—against any desire that is unbridled and runaway-—is also his most comprehensive aesthetic maneuver. Where capitalism was going, Mann felt, so also was the novel; both were too blithely overthrowing the old and too unthinkingly embracing the new. In the late stages of capitalism, as the economics of a producer society are converted to those of a consumer society, the product becomes a commodity valued for its packaging, for its surface appeal to faddishness with its model changes and planned obsolescence. In a like manner, the modernist emphasis on the novel as the place of experimentation threatened to scuttle a long-established literary form—so it seemed to Mann—without a backward or forward thought.17 Such a readiness for radical change, in the long view, must appear as ironic, and time is the tool of the conservatism that reveals and corrects that irony. It is the "conserve" in conservatism that holds an appeal for Mann, who is above all the artist who saves. In Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918). Mann quotes approvingly a statement of conservative faith written by Friedrich Gentz: World history is a perpetual transition from the old to the new. In a constant succession of things, everything destroys itself, and the mature fruit falls away from the parent stem. But if this succession is not to mean the swift decline of all life and living things, including of course all right and good things, then there must necessarily be, alongside the large and finally preponderant number working for the new, a smaller group that seek, with measure and within limits, to assert the old and see to it that the 76

Buddenbrooks stream of time, though they cannot and would not choke it, shall flow in a regulated bed.18 In Buddenbrooks Mann lets us see that "the mature fruit falls away from the parent stem," but his story of the sons is couched in a narrative that insures that "the stream of time . . . shall flow in a regulated bed." Mann's Utopian vision would present a world that was benevolent in its linearity, perhaps one that included a larger brotherhood and a more general descent than that founded by the burgher fathers of the past; for, despite its obvious abuses and misuses, the genealogical imperative alone can guarantee the paternal promise that the good traditions of the past will survive the problematic innovations of the future. For Mann, it was as morally wrong to be formless in art as it was aesthetically tasteless to be discomposed in life, and "to assert the old" was to confirm the "productive plan" which he believed informed both life and art. I would not wish to be so diligent in explicating the blindness attendant upon such a conviction as to ignore the wisdom that has made Mann deservedly and unreservedly one of our truly great novelists. A large part of that greatness, which informs the Joseph tetralogy of his maturity, was his ability to maintain an ironic attitude toward his own firm allegiance to the world of the fathers. Joseph, as Harold Rosenberg puts it in his short and witty essay,19 plays the lead role in a "comedy of the divine," and his cheerfully wry acceptance of that role serves as a foil to the tragically burdened Buddenbrooks. Similarly trapped in a genealogy, the last son of a long line of Hebrew Fathers, Joseph faces up to his own secondariness, to the fact that he has been inserted in a divine plan he had no part in originating, and

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"Links in a Chain" comically busies himself in fulfillng the legacies of prophecy. Joseph travels the same historical road taken by every Buddenbrook son, with the witty difference that he knows he is a character in a story already written, and chooses to embrace, rather than lament, his fatedness. Joseph is the creation of a narrative intelligence reflecting on itself and arriving at the self-conscious conclusion that stories are, after all, our own inventions. Mann stopped, however, at that high point of ironic poise. I am fairly certain that he could never have entertained seriously the question that drives Antoine Roquentin to despair: "what if contingency, and not necessity, was the essence of life?" Sartre's Nausea is a detailed, anguished record of what it means to confront that notion as a probability. One consequence is that the right to tell stories is severely questioned: This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose to live or tell. . . . Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. . . . Neither is there any end. . . . That's living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it's a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite 78

Buddenbrooks sense. You seem to start at the beginning: "It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary's clerk in Marommes." And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. . . . And the story goes on in the reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves in a lighthearted way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and each one of them in turn draws out the preceding instant. . . . I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.20 Contrary to Thomas Mann, Roquentin refuses a mimetic analogy between narrative form and human existence. The genealogical imperative implicit in story is a lie, a "posthumous glance" (Sartre's phrase in his autobiography, The Words) that imposes retrospective analysis upon a life which can only be lived prospectively, in the middle, without a future that is already there. Sequence, succession, continuity—all these are comfortable bourgeois deceptions. And so Roquentin ceases work on the biography he has been writing (it was "pure imagination"), and commences work on the diary which is Nausea—fragmented, nebulous, and of the present. Although none of the authors in this study will abandon narrative to this extent, neither will any one of them exhibit Mann's secure trust in the imperatives of genealogy. To Mann's form, "impersonal like logic," D. H. Lawrence will oppose a highly eccentric and personal language. Playing style against story, he will exac-

79

"Links in a Chain" erbate the tension between writing as pro-creation (for the future and from the past) and writing as re-creation (beginning again and again in the present). Lawrence's erotic disclosure of those moments of inwardness, during which consciousness confronts the real self and declares its independence of the past, reveals at the same time the confrontation of linear narrative with the prerogatives of its discrete elements. With The Rainbow, the generational novel loses, perhaps forever, the unwavering purity of Thomas Mann's parental guarantee.

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3 The Cycle Dance: D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

Thomas Mann's serious respect for dynastic tradition, his pleasure at the thought of generations "crossing hands in the dance of life," his notion of art as the legitimation of historical time—not one of these responses is shared by David Herbert Lawrence. Indeed, given his abundant testimony to the contrary, one is led to inquire why Lawrence ever chose to write a novel of generations. The structure of any novel is hardly a subordinate fact of its total impact; and the structure of a genealogical novel, in its elevation of the societal fact of family to formal significance, most especially commits the novelist to a definition of individual identity through its familial connections, and to an elaboration of time as the continuity between an inheritance and a legacy. It is no wonder, then, that the following statement seems extraordinarily inapt, coming as it does from the author of The Rainbow: The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being, is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax, the degree to be striven for. Not the work I shall produce, but the real Me I shall achieve, that is the consideration; of the complete Me will come 81

The Cycle Dance the complete fruit of me, the work, the children. . . . Seed and fruit and produce, these are only a minor aim: children and good works are a minor aim . . . the final aim is the flower.1 For a novelist who thus summarily dismisses the family relationship as a biological aftermath, the most obvious choice of novel form might well be the Bildungsroman, which posits the flight from family as a central act in the hero's coming-of-age, and halts on the brink of his maturity before he is pushed into that death which is fatherhood. Accordingly, in a first novel similar to Mann's in its autobiographical genesis, Lawrence gave us Sons and Lovers, and later, consistent with his fascination in the emergent self, Women in Love. In both books, the release of self from familial bonds is told as a flowering, a reaching beyond genetic constraints, rather than as a continuance of or an entry into acceptance of those constraints. T h e genealogical structure of The Rainbow, therefore, presents us at the outset with a puzzlement of irrelevance, which must be dispelled before the real accomplishments of that novel can be recognized. T h e particulars of Lawrence's thought, a matter of public record, adhere consistently to a sense of self that resists the customary socialization of self in the classical novel. At least three tenets of Lawrentian doctrine are inimical to the individual as fruit of the family. T h e first is Lawrence's well-known animadversion to the "old stable ego" of life and literature, as the culmination of a cultural processing that polishes the diamond-inthe-rough child to a high sheen of crystalline consciousness. Lawrence would reverse this direction, into the diamond dematerializing into carbon, the superficial ego 82

The Rainbow keying down to the essential unconscious, the fathered self disclaiming his birthright for the prerogatives of self-begetting.2 This devolutionary movement, this degeneration of the "egocentric absolute," is succeeded by a movement out, whereby the single being experiences an ecstatic, exocentric connection within the entire cosmos. In this second swerve away from genealogical destiny, in "this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature," 3 the novelist replaces nurture with nature, the family as cultural transmitter with an environment vibrating with cosmic signs. Thus far, Lawrence's focus is double, and at a double remove from the family: toward the new living self, displaced from the center and connected with the universe, and back through the stabilized ego toward the unconscious. Lawrence's third oblique departure, from a dependence upon generational time, opens up a lateral movement of self, which mutes the linear emphases upon descent and filiation. This is his excessive valorization of the male/female relationship above all others. "The great relationship, for humanity, will always be the relation between man and woman. The relation between man'and man, parent and child, will always be subsidiary."4 Heterosexual union, in fact— quite outside the prescribed imperatives of genealogy —fathers the new self upon the old. Thus, Lawrence's most familiar declarations of faith seem to suggest an aesthetic unwisdom in his choice of the genealogical model. The quandaries almost pose themselves. If the pivotal human experiences are between male and female, old ego and new self, new self and cosmos—then why write a novel of generations? If the present time of spontaneous genesis is sacred, why saddle oneself with a family history that augments no83

The Cycle Dance tions of an orderly, developmental continuity? How can the gradations of temporal unfolding pertain to the explosions within the moment of instantaneous rebirth, cosmic alignment, and sexual ecstasy? T h e larger category of inquiry, under which all these questions may be subsumed, involves a suspicion of friction or impasse between theme and structure, between what Lawrence thinks and how he builds. Yet all of this discussion is very much to tread the high road of theory; when we descend from those heights, we discover that the novel does seem to hang together, if not at the level of theoretical logic, then at the level of its reading. If there is indeed this effect of cohesion, then we might begin to look for its preliminary causes in the modifications that Lawrence makes in the Brangwen genealogy, in order to render that family structure more amenable to his privileged philosophy. He begins by depriving his dynastic family of both origins and destiny. Compared to Buddenbrooks, The Rainbow is radically undevelopmental. As a family the Brangwens neither rise nor decline, succeed nor fail; structurally, they lack the initial and final terminals that make such an assessment possible—they are missing an old Johann and a little Hanno. T h e "family line" begins in anonymity and ends in indecisiveness. It is also true that the Brangwens lack the public dimensions of the Buddenbrooks, that they are never the grand family whose fortunes may be plotted; they do exhibit, nevertheless, a continuing movement from private to public —from the Marsh to Cossethay, from farming to schoolteaching, from village to university. Yet these later chapters on the "widening circle" and the "man's world" belong more to Ursula's individual progress, and are essentially nondefinitive of the entire Brangwen family, 84

The Rainbow who have over the generations been shaped, more or less passively, by the industrialization creeping across the English countryside. Within the family itself, parents and children feel no sense of ancestral duty, whether honorable or onerous, and no sense of a future predetermined by a dynastic tradition. Childhood is largely invisible, b u t when it does come to light, it is in the blurred focus of oedipal substitutions common to the Freudian "family romance" and foreign to the patriarchal dominance of Buddenbrook males. Without parental control to provoke conscious emulation or outright rejection, the Brangwen child reaches a young maturity that is perceived as novel and open-ended, unencumbered by parental precept or example. Nevertheless, what the child faces as new experience, the reader recognizes as a resonance from the past: in each generation, with only minor variations in anecdotal detail and outcome, the child repeats the parental ordeal of self. This sameness of experience is totally different from Mann's use of the same quality in each generation as the specification of difference, which will then allow him to chart decline; rather, sameness here deprives the individual of the unique and singular quality of historical time, and promotes a sense of his or her placement within larger, eternal patterns. Roger Sale has noticed how much Lawrence's narrative depends upon this assumption of an extrahistorical potential that the individual can tap, and thus be freed of an immediate inheritance. 5 Ursula Brangwen is not so much at the end of a developmental line, as she is the latest participant in a perennial human project, and we would be hard put to declare her better or worse than her grandparents T o m and Lydia, or her parents Will and Anna. H e r legacy is solely the ordeal itself, its necessary 85

The Cycle Dance recurrence taking precedence over the modulations and revisions each generation may devise. By forcing it to record recurrence, Lawrence diverts the genealogical structure from its traditional investment in the culmination of differences, and channels it into a comparison of similarities. This conversion—of the historical distinction between generations into a repeated pattern of self-discovery—represents a major accommodation of Lawrence's structure to his thought. There is an additional peculiarity in this genealogy that renders its structure more receptive to Lawrence's favored positions: the familial line of succession passes from fathers to daughters. Unlike the disinherited daughters of the male Buddenbrook line, Anna and Ursula are the sole inheritors in a pattern that repeats itself almost exactly in both generations. Its description is classically oedipal: In the absence of the pregnant wife, the father cleaves to the daughter; the daughter rejects the daylit mother for the dark father, and they are as lovers; the mother reclaims the husband, and the child becomes as nothing for both parents, freed now to develop her own hidden self, which she has glimpsed in the father. T h e modulations within the repetition of each generation reflect what is unique in the parents' sexual relationship, thereby making the absent, silent mother an equal contributor in the legacy to the daughter. Anna, leaning on her stepfather's lap as he comes and goes in a torpor, inherits her mother Lydia's own weightlessness, which was part of Tom's dream in the vicar's kitchen (38-39, 69). And upon a fearful Ursula, Will bestows the conflict that he has endured with her mother—as when he leaps with her from the bridge, or when he pushes her into furious motion on the swing86

The Rainbow boat (211-12). The daughter's sexual dance with her father is brief, but its effects resonate; and because it is so intimately bound up with the mother, it offers a vastly richer heritage than does the single line of male descent of the Buddenbrooks, in which the female half of the family fails to transmit itself. This unusual emphasis upon a bisexual heritage proceeds from the widest parameters of Lawrence's thought, from which he will effect subversions of the genealogical imperative far more dramatic and less apparent than a father/daughter genealogy. For Lawrence, the entire universe is wholly sexed, having contained at its genesis "an inexplicable first duality, a division in the cosmos."6 The two active principles that generate all life are differentiated sexually as the male Will-to-Motion and the female Will-to-Inertia. This doubleness, which is the very condition of life, insures also that life will not have a center, will not have a single origin from which a line might descend. Instead, life is all motion, a continuous and reciprocal movement of contraries revolving in a double cycle. This is Lawrence's description of the cycle dance of life: For it is as if life were a double cycle, of men and women, facing opposite ways, revolving upon each other, man reaching forward with outstretched hand, woman reaching forward with outstretched hand, and neither able to move until their hands have grasped each other, when they draw toward each other from opposite directions, draw nearer and nearer, each travelling in his separate cycle, till the two are abreast, and side by side, until even they pass on again, away from each other, travel87

The Cycle Dance ling their opposite ways to the same infinite goal. Each travelling to the same goal of infinity, but entering it from the opposite ends of space.7 Cosmic duality, of course, is an antique, even tired, idea; only the special embellishments that Lawrence adds renew its interest for us here. First we note that in a world supposedly whirling on the fulcrum of difference, the male and female figures of difference, when seen in the cosmic perspective of their dance, are very much the same: both revolve, reach out, come near, pass by, and return to their unspecified starting points. Each moves through an asymtotic trajectory, tangentially approaching a point of contact, which becomes a curve indefinitely receding back along its own infinite branching. In this movement, inertia and motion, female and male, are undifferentiated, cooperative, unantagonistic. There is the suggestion that sexual tension is never an absolute, but rather a perpetual movement toward its own suspension. Certainly, the brief point of contact has nothing in common with sexual consummation or, indeed, with any kind of climactic closure at all. Instead, the entire figure of the dance seems to indicate a dissolution, dispersal, defusing of sexual conflict—a direction of thought incommensurate with Lawrence's notorious (and, I will argue, inappropriate) reputation as the passionate prophet of genital sexuality. If we look with care at the pivotal scene of sexual consummation, as it recurs among the couples of three Brangwen generations, we shall be better enabled to define the nature of this dance, and to place it within the novel's genealogical structure. T h e first of these scenes occurs early in the novel, in the vicar's kitchen, where Lydia Lensky has just accepted T o m Brangwen's proposal of marriage: 88

The Rainbow He had her in his arms, and, obliterated, was kissing her. And it was sheer, blenched agony to him, to break away from himself. She was there so small and light and accepting in his arms, like a child, and yet with such an insinuation of embrace, infinite embrace, that he could not bear it, he could not stand. He turned and looked for a chair, and keeping her still in his arms, sat down with her close to him, to his breast. Then, for a few seconds, he went utterly to sleep, asleep and sealed in the darkest sleep, utter, extreme oblivion. From which he came to gradually, always holding her warm and close upon him, and she as utterly silent as he, involved in the same oblivion, the fecund darkness. He returned gradually, but newly created, as after a gestation, a new birth, in the womb of darkness. Aerial and light everything was, new as morning, fresh and newly begun. Like a dawn the newness and bliss filled in. And she sat utterly still with him, as if in the same. Then she looked up at him, the wide, young eyes blazing with light. And he bent down and kissed her on the lips. And the dawn blazed in them, their new life came to pass, it was beyond all conceiving good, it was so good, that it was almost like a passing-away, a trespass. He drew her suddenly closer to him. For soon the light began to fade in her, gradually, and as she was in his arms, her head sank, she leaned it against him, and lay still, with sunk head, a little tired, effaced because she was tired. And in her tiredness was a certain negation of him. . . . 89

The Cycle Dance H e sat and listened and wondered. It was rather splendid, to be so ignored by her, whilst she lay against him and he lifted her with his breathing, and felt her weight upon his living, so he had a completeness and an inviolable power. H e did not interfere with her. He did not even know her. It was so strange that she lay there with her weight abandoned upon him. He was silent with delight. He felt strong, physically, carrying her on his breathing. T h e strange, inviolable completeness of the two of them made him feel as sure and stable as God. Amused, he wondered what the vicar would say if he knew. 8 This is sexuality that has gone chaste, seduction turned to swoon. We are in the presence of a masterful choreography of contraries—a rhythmic cooperation between intimacy and alienation, sleep and waking, light and darkness, merging and separation. This cycle of fadeand-swell recurs within a time that is too easeful for the usual discriminations, a time whose predominant adverb is "gradually," yet marks the significance of the experience for the self with the adverbs, "utterly" and "newly." Within this unifying stasis (of "still" and "silent" and "stable") there is continuing change and exchange (the " h e " and "she" fusing as "they" and once again parting, the halt and swing of the proliferating commas), tensions dancing in the space of tension suspended. T h e scene is thus liberated, by its time and space, from a narrative that would call the tune. In the next generation, the narrative structure, becoming more obtrusive, effectively challenges from the outside the stillness, steadiness, and silence with its own contraries—motion, change, and noise. Here, then, are 90

The Rainbow Will and Anna Brangwen in their cottage bedroom after their wedding: Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and destruction. Here at the centre the great wheel was motionless, centred upon itself. Here was a poised, unflawed stillness that was beyond time, because it remained the same, inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted. As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of time and change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep inside them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise: the steady core of all movements, the unawakened sleep of all wakefulness. They found themselves there, and they lay still, in each other's arms; for their moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off, forever far off, towards the rim. T h e n gradually they were passed away from the supreme centre, down the circles of praise and joy and gladness, further and further out, towards the noise and the friction. But their hearts had burned and were tempered by the inner reality, they were unalterably glad. Gradually they began to wake up, the noises outside became more real. They understood and answered the call outside. They counted the strokes of the bell. And when they counted midday, they understood that it was midday, in the world, and for themselves also. (135) 91

The Cycle Dance Here are the same elements of opposition as those represented in the vicar's kitchen, but there is a different system of dispersal: a matter, not of within and between, but of inside and outside. At the h u b of a wheel, Will and Anna tarry in a nonexistent center, much sought but always found to be merely a point in an asymtotic passage, a fool's paradise. Lawrence is giving fair warning of the falsity in any "stillness" that is "poised, unflawed" and given completely over to the praise of the absolute; for when time chimes, he makes Anna and Will answer that bell which will insert them into history and into the novel. Anna and Will are much more at the call of the genealogical demands of narrative than are T o m and Lydia of the first generation, who never mistake the cycle dance for a regimen of passive center and active circumference. An excursion into comparison, before approaching Ursula and Anton Skrebensky in the third generation, will demonstrate how the generational structure makes its developmental imperatives felt. Essentially, it is a matter of words, which Lydia and T o m will let go, but Anna will not. Lydia obliterates her husband with words, until the second year of their marriage, when they experience once again the "no future, no past" of their wedding hour. T h e consummation is punctuated by only two utterances, "my love," "my dear," which are Lydia's calls to reconciliation. Thereafter, it is silence which is the ideal: " H e did not understand her foreign nature, half German, half Polish, nor her foreign speech. But he knew her, he knew her meaning without understanding. What she said, what she spoke, this was a blind gesture on her part" (87). Lawrence makes a radical statement here: he is saying that life triumphs when words fail, that the "under92

The Rainbow standing" to which language is supposedly in service is inferior to an ineffable, silent "knowing," and—by implication—that the novel which is truly the "one bright book of life is the literary form that does not speak its significant truths. Some such escalation, from theme to language, seems justified by the final appearance of this couple in the novel: "They had passed through the doorway into the further space, where movement was so big, that it contained bonds and constraints and labours, and still was complete liberty" (87). Transfigured and transcendent in an exclusive world of two, T o m and Lydia are an end in themselves, unavailable furthermore for novelistic ends. In short, having been retired into the "strong time" 9 of myth, they are not to be accommodated within the continuing, profane, historical enterprise of the family. T h e Biblical flood, which closes over Tom-as-Noah in the ninth chapter, has already closed over the couple earlier, blessing their dance and removing them from the narrative: "God had passed through the married pair without fully making Himself known to them. . . . W h e n at last they joined hands, the house was finished and the Lord took u p his abode. And they were glad" (87-88). Will and Anna, to the contrary, never join hands, and thus do not so soon escape the narrative. Instead, the hawk-on-hawk complicity of their coupling drives them into the productive work and childbearing, into the productive fictional incident that the genealogical structure expects of them. Anna's pregnancy, unlike Lydia's mere forgetfulness, is a nullification of her husband; she attacks Will with harsh words and abrasive gestures; and when they unite in sexual union, they are each one as the "Other," accomplices in the shame of sexuality. T h u s far removed from a rhythm of equilibrium, Will and 93

The Cycle Dance Anna fall firmly into historicity ("The house by the yew trees was in connection with the great human endeavour at last" [224]), satisfying thereby their structural obligations on at least two points: Ursula, their daughter, will inherit the full generational potential— the depth and heights of T o m and Lydia, the breadth of Will and Anna—and she will possess a prosaic, immediate past, of which she may divest herself as she moves toward the "moonlit space" of cosmic connection. Ursula occupies that space with Anton Skrebensky, and she is the first Brangwen whose ecstatic cycle dance is a literal one: They became one movement, one dual movement, dancing on the slippery grass. It would be endless, this movement, it would continue forever. It was her will and his will locked in a trance of motion, yet never fusing, never yielding one to the other. It was a glaucous, intertwining, delicious flux and contest in flux. . . . There was a wonderful rocking in the darkness, slowly, a great, slow swinging of the whole night, with the music playing lightly on the surface, making the strange, ecstatic, rippling on the surface of the dance, but underneath only one great flood heaving slowly backwards to the verge of oblivion, slowly forward to the other verge, the heart sweeping along each time, and tightening with anguish as the limit was reached, and the movement, at crises, turned and swept back. (299) T h e basic nature of the cycle dance remains the same: a gradual swing into anguish, a limit is reached, and a slow receding into oblivion, the male and female un94

The Rainbow differentiated in a movement at once single and dual. But the novel is drawing to a close, the place where one anticipates a weighted emphasis, an accumulation of meaning—in short, a difference. If the structure is to fulfill the imperatives of a genealogy—even more especially in a family chronicle that repeats in each generation the identical pattern of self-discovery—Ursula must represent, definitively, a success or failure beyond that of her parents and grandparents. Ursula is, emphatically, neither. By testing herself against the public world of society, she has opened up the enclosed experience of her grandparents, and she has enlarged upon her parents' daylight world by plunging herself, "unroofed," into the darkness of moon and water. On the debit side of the balance, she has missed the maturing experience central to the other Brangwen selves: she does not know what it is to be in cooperative conflict with a sexual partner; all she knows is the terror of a deficient sexual opponent. Her cycle dance with Anton concludes with her corrosive dominance and his abject dissolution beneath her "harpy's kiss," an easy victory over a hollow man. Hers is the destructive power leashed within the isolated self, which marks her yet as the sterile "egocentric individual" who willfully rejects rhythms of mutuality. That is why (as Julian Moynahan has perceptively noted10) the great culminating symbols of the book, the wild horses and the rainbow—cosmic signs for those who have "come through"—are not for Ursula. They represent, rather, Lawrence's own willful closure by metaphor. Ursula's final state is so tentative a beginning that her proper natural analog is the humble, unobtrusive acorn, which is reborn in the spring a "naked, clear kernel" into the flux of Time (464). Three gen95

The Cycle Dance erations of Brangwens have produced not the flower that Lawrence bravely prophesied, but merely the intuition of a flowering. If I have dwelt at length upon these three scenes, it is because they, and several others similar to them, appear to be a primary means through which Lawrence fathers a philosophy of recurrence upon a developmental structure, and begets upon a linear, and thus fundamentally asexual, family history the lateral sexuality of the couple. I have an additional interest in considering the scene, in contradistinction to the event, as a compositional resource. T h e scene belongs to description, is enacted in space, and need have no temporal index; the event, as the ground of narration, must be located in time. Before the historian, biographer, or traditional novelist can begin to narrate, he must first define his raw materials unmistakably as events, so that they may be perceived as the markers of a time that is passing. T h e event can be so specified only through the absolute designation of its terminals of beginning and end; it can serve as a marker of time, that is to say, only after it has itself been marked off from the flow of time. This normative, conditional use of narrative event is precisely what is muted in The Rainbow's most memorable passages. (Most readers agree that in the later sections, when Lawrence gives Ursula his own autobiographical incidents, the book loses much of its momentum.) In Lawrence's hands, the scene functions as an abrogation of historical time, blurring the crisp outlines that would put it at the service of a fictional documentation of human life and destiny. Even when the scene ceases, and Lawrence resumes again what passes for narrative exposition, nothing is posed or exposed beyond this generalizing haze that informs his novelistic characters— 96

The Rainbow nothing is ever, once and for all, over and done with. It is as if Lawrence believes he can enter time noiselessly and escape, giving nothing to its uses. What is highly audible in these scenes, themselves silent and almost devoid of dialogue, is the voice of Lawrence's writing, his style. Like the scene, the language inserts itself into time, without marking it off, without leaving a mark. Like the human experience it describes—that tentative, revolving nonstate of being which is all motion—the prose, circumventing any linguistic activity aimed at denotation, dances in infinitely refined gradations those reverberations of meaning that are as largely unspecified as they are richly connotative. No more than the descriptive unit of the scene does the semantic unit of the sentence function to originate, sustain, and complete meaning. Its terminal punctuation, the capital and the period, is a blind for what, from the viewpoint of sentence logic, is the muddle of the middle —a sliding-into that becomes a fade, a beginning again that never finishes, a temporal action that never progresses. The sentence that dissolves and reforms energies without substance is the linguistic parallel of the historical recycling of experience that the novel's structure evokes. One has only to listen to the famous sheaves scene to comprehend language as a cycle dance: Into the rhythm of his work there came a pulse and a steadied purpose. He stooped, he lifted the weight, he heaved it toward her, setting it as in her, under the moonlit space. And he went back for more. Ever with increasing closeness he lifted the sheaves and swung striding to the centre with them, ever he drove her more nearly to the meeting, ever he did his share, and drew towards her, overtaking 97

The Cycle Dance her. There was only the moving to and fro in the moonlight, engrossed, the swinging in the silence, that was marked only by the splash of sheaves, and silence, and a splash of sheaves. And ever the splash of sheaves broke swifter, beating u p to hers, and ever the splash of her sheaves recurred monotonously, unchanging, and ever the splash of his sheaves beat nearer. (113) Here, the language, serving only the swing of its own repetitive rhythms, bears almost no information, its signifying feature appearing as a refusal to signify. Hesitating to name anything beyond their own continuing activity of modulation, the sentences fade and return, wax and wane, ebb and flow, in an imperfect sayingover-and-over that defies the compulsive laws of closure and logic that define sentence mastery in our culture. It is writing dancing its irresponsibility, a voice celebrating its circles above the rational line of language. Always sensitive to cultural intolerance, Lawrence felt impelled, in his foreword to Women in Love, to justify a voice so alien to the purposes of prose fiction: "In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. T h e only answer is that it is natural to the author: and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to and fro, which works u p to culmination." With Lawrence's assertion of the ubiquitous universality of "to and fro," we come to a pause in this study. W e are a long way, it seems, from our initial positing of wide disparities between the structure and thought in The Rainbow; indeed, we appear to have arrived at a conviction of a remarkable economy in the novel, in

98

The Rainbow which theme, content, structure, scene, and sentence all coincide in their cyclic effects. In his negation of the terminals—and of the culmination that depends upon a clearly designated beginning and end—Lawrence circumvents the boundaries and categories of the linear economy, which governs so much of literature and life. Instead, he presents in The Rainbow a cyclical economy, a different system of preservation and storage that always gets back what it uses up, that preserves what it spends, that returns to the self all that is other. In the presence of such an apparently overdetermined accounting, the critic, like the psychoanalyst, seeks to turn away from descriptive statements, in order to ask suddenly crucial questions of motivation. Accordingly, under such an aegis of suspicion, I want now to interrogate the why's of Lawrence's creation, to assess the costs to him of fictional inspiration, as that production may be considered a kind of psycho-linguistic double-entry bookkeeping with credits and debits. Edward Said anticipates my analysis with his own stunning meditation upon "authority" and "molestation," which, he argues in Beginnings, are both inevitably present to the author's intention as he begins his novel. Any notion of the complete freedom of imaginative invention is a deceptive one, and the novelist at the outset knows this. As father, begetter, ancestor of the book, the novelist assumes all the authority associated with inauguration, possession, augmentation, extension, and continuity—that is, in the terms of this study, the powers of a patriarch in relation to his book. Through the systematic enforcement of technique, he can bestow, govern, and guarantee the vision of the work. But the novelist's is an ever precarious authority, acknowledged as borrowed or usurped, for it exists only 99

The Cycle Dance in language and the realm of illusion, beyond which looms the absolute truth of God the Father's Creation. This is the source of authorial "molestation": Because the author is aware of his own ironic duplicity, the secondariness of his fiction and its alternative status, and yet knows himself invested with the authority to legitimatize his illusions, he is nagged by an acute sense of restraint, which puts pressure upon him to make the demystification of his own created illusions the central project of his novel. With all the authority he can command to enforce his imperatives, then, the novelistfather carries also the bothersome responsibility of unmasking himself as the tyrant over contingency. 11 Lawrence himself speaks in distinct echo of Said's formulation, although he locates the tension, not within the author, but between the author and the genre he has chosen to work with. Lawrence's respect for the novel as a genre is widely advertised, and the single attribute upon which he bases its superiority, we see now, proceeds directly from the authorial molestation that Said has analyzed: " T h e novel," Lawrence claims, "is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute." It is time that corrects the author's appetite for imposing a fiction upon a reality that can't talk back, because at the novel's center and inner form, time throws out obstacles to any aggrandizing ambition—within its passing and duration time revises, modifies, and subverts the One. Unlike the lyric, whose unimpeding timelessness marks it as a perfect vehicle for the authorial voice, the novel with its temporal index works against an almost universal drive toward singleness on the part of the authorizing author: "Nearly all great novelists have a 100

The Rainbow didactic purpose, otherwise a philosophy, directly opposite to their passional inspiration." 12 In the convergence of Said's and Lawrence's testimony, we can identify two areas of predictable conflict, and define the oppositions: first between author and work—the novelist's authorizing philosophical monism, and the novel's incapacity for the absolute; and second within authorial intentionality—the authoritative "didactic purpose" and the molesting "passional inspiration." A consideration of this drama in The Rainbow's, creation should yield the final, and most fully descriptive, statement of that novel. Because Lawrence draws human beings who dance their lives to inarticulated, instinctual rhythms, we are inclined to forget how highly articulate and discriminating is the thought he brings to their creation. Lawrence is a writer full of thought, toward which, as we have seen, he owes an allegiance far stronger than his commitment to the genealogical structure that he ubiquitously subverts in The Rainbow. Because thought itself is authoritative for him, it wholly authorizes those strategies by which he divests his model of its patrilineal causality. In other words, from Lawrence's rethinking of character and cosmos, there extends a direct line of descent to his representative techniques, that is, patterns of recurrence, exposition by scenes, and repetitive style. In addition to this philosophical governance—through which, authoritatively, he converts the family, story, and sentence lines to his own unique thought—Lawrence exhibits a strong moral appetite for the ideal, the very "absolute" that the novel in its temporal form disallows. As disdainful as he may be of other writer's didacticism, Lawrence himself has the willfulness of the prophet, who would make true what is not, who would bring into 101

The Cycle Dance the present a Utopian future that never was, who would present as life itself his own private ideal of life as it could or should be. At the most obvious and general level of theme, The Rainbow frustrates the authorial will by enacting over and over again the lesson of Lawrence's "passional inspiration": that one wins the Lawrentian self only through losing the will. For instance, the willful selfassertion of femaleness prohibits Anna in the cathedral and Ursula by moonlight from being reborn, a rebirth engendered solely through the reciprocal doubleness of the male/female cycle dance. In choosing war over love, friction over mutuality, the heroine discovers that singularity promotes a factiousness that is inconsistent with the connectedness of cooperating contraries elsewhere in the cosmos. Lawrence's characters may be tempted by the promise that time holds out to them alone, but only the irrevocably failed characters adhere to a notion of the individual's prideful isolation. "You are not the beginning and the end," Lydia Lensky tells her dying, disillusioned husband. Alfred Brangwen, duly and dully married, may insist that "you've got to go on by yourself, if it's only to perdition. There's nobody going alongside even there"; however, it is his brother T o m who has authorial approval when he drunkenly answers that only the married soul will ascend to heaven, for "a married couple makes one Angel" (128-32). Thus, in major and minor keys, the novel sings the praises ol difference suspended within sameness, of a unity that contains (in both senses of that word, to enclose and restrain) opposition. In a brilliant maneuver of analogical thought, Leo Bersani fills with content the conflictual space that Said opens up for the operations of molestation and au102

The Rainbow thority. T h e analogy, which Bersani uncovers as the unintentional motivation behind Lawrence's work, is between frictional sex and reductive analysis. T h e delineation of that analogy goes something like this: T h e establishment of difference—specifically, the separation of selves and thought into discrete, distinct, sexual and logical units—is necessary for the duplication and continuance of these units in future interactions. It is this assignment of differentiation, this rigid fixation of sexual and logical boundaries, that initiates and sustains those categories of opposition and identity which at once render thought authoritative and sexual conflict inevitable. Willed thought, like willful sexuality, is inhuman and death-promoting, because both commit themselves to a regular, mechanical, maniacal repetition, so dependent upon its initial authorization that it categorically refuses novelty, that is, either the new thought, or the reborn self.13 Grounded in this analogy, The Rainbow legitimates and, at the same time, escapes authorial fathering, maturing within this doubling process into the complexly crafted and sincerely lying fable it is. For everywhere in this novel is exposed Lawrence's distinterest in, and incapacity for, the differentiation which is the essential requirement of both a philosophical absolute and mature, genital sexuality. Within the cycle dance, diffusion, not difference, pertains: in a good performance men and women are more alike than different, generations are as mythically eternal as they are historically mortal, daughters inherit equally from mother and father, ineffable scenes spill over into an unsayable narration. Within the continuum of their repeated motions, Lawrence begets upon historical change, semantic culmination, and sexual climax such fine gradations of differentiation that the effects seem to be still103

The Cycle Dance ness, silence, and equilibrium. From the other side, Lawrence's negation of difference is his positive wager on analogy as the ideal mode of experience and knowledge. In analogy he invests his great hope of a world without conflict—one in which similitude and empathy connect all parts of the universe in mutual reflections and refractions of reciprocity. Although the both jand gains of such a cyclical economy may be celebrated for the plenitude gained, it is well to remember, with Michel Foucault, that the additive-repetitive-accumulative ends of analogy—indeed "incapable of the absolute"—produce only the most poverty-stricken kind of knowledge. 14 T h e novel's diffusiveness disinherits at once the hammering home of one's moral ideals and the sexual thrust of maleoriented sexuality; and its disinclination toward closure and culmination accounts for the silence that surrounds both orgasm and intelligibility in The Rainbow. Certainly, sex is the pervasive thread twisting around Lawrence's life, thought, and work, but the unraveling is difficult, for one doesn't know which strand to pull first. Bersani's argument ("the ultimate Lawrentian goal is the death of desire") is heavily psychoanalytical. William Gass reaches similar conclusions (Lawrence feared the "menacing female monolith," admired only those men who were "amputees," and greatly preferred the bees and the flowers), largely upon the biographical evidence turned u p in the posthumous papers. I am inclined to prefer a third approach, to which Gass alludes only in passing: "Much of Lawrence's writing, it seems to me, is symptomatic speech, controlled by his inner reality, and measurable by little else." 15 "Symptomatic speech" is the point at which Emile Benveniste enters literary analysis from linguistics and, in addition, uses the insights of psychoanalysis. Speech, Benveniste ar104

The Rainbow gues, is the means through which a single individual appropriates to himself an entire language, and defines himself as the singular in opposition to others, as "ego." T h e distinctive peculiarities of an author's self-definition may be studied through his style, which is most appropriately designated as the speech of writing and the voice of person. T h e critic of literature, therefore, should follow the lead of the analyst in the psychoanalytic procedure, and interrogate authorial style for motivation—personal speech being the space for revelation of authoritative/molested intentionality—rather than for the identification of fact and event. 10 Here, in the style that is speech, Lawrence effects his ultimate escape from the discomfiture of novelistic authority and aligns himself with his authentic inspiration—here, where language is luxury, where saying is playing, where the words dance rather than work. In a style profoundly oral and individuated, we hear a language of formulaic ritual and incantatory reiteration that celebrates itself beyond its most common authority, its use-value. More than Lawrence's other conversions of the genealogical imperative, this release of language from its ordinary economy and efficiency relieves us all —Ursula, the reader, Lawrence himself—from its anonymous inevitabilities. T h e sentence, like the novel, is finally obliged to end; but words in a cycle dance do nothing usefully, and these repeat and repeat, crazily and cooperatively out of control, making the figure of a truth newer and truer than can be reductively verbalized, erotically hovering—like the couples in their scenes of sexual swoon—above the book's structure, ecstatically refusing climax. More than any other author in this study, Lawrence carried it off through style: his own voice respectfully 105

The Cycle Dance returns the authority he has borrowed. The complex trade-offs in The Rainbow instruct us in the dialectical divergency of intention and creation, individual talent and the tradition, conscience and the unconscious. If, for Lawrence, there is no line to the private life of the individual, or to the public life of history, or to the literary form that recreates them, it is because he could fix no beginning or end points through which to draw it. Nor was all this always opaque to Lawrence; indeed, his own voice perhaps serves best to disentangle himself from the various demands of genealogy: "When we postulate a beginning, we do so only to fix a startingpoint for our thought. There never was a beginning, and there never will be an end of the universe. The creative mystery, which is life itself, always was and always will be. It unfolds itself in pure living creatures."17

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4 "The Shadowy Attenuation of Time": William Faulkner, A bsalom, A bsalom!

D. H. Lawrence's unequivocal advice to the critic— "Never trust the teller, trust the tale"—becomes richly problematic for the critic of William Faulkner's work, for Faulkner himself is a teller who has proven marvelously unreliable in commenting on his own novels, and who writes novels featuring unreliable tellers of the tale. Once the teller is in the tale, it becomes impossible to dismiss him so summarily. Yet this seems to be the impulse behind Faulkner's repeated insistence, to his students at the University of Virginia, that the genesis of Absalom, Absalom! was "the idea of a man who wanted sons and got sons who destroyed him. The other characters I had to get out of the attic to tell the story of Sutpen. . . . The central character is Sutpen, yes."1 In this perspective, the multiplication of partial and biased narrators becomes a structuring technique perfectly coincident in intent with Faulkner's immersive and obscuring stylistic technique: both structure and style serve to withhold meaning and delay revelation long enough for the reader to become hypnotized with the mythical reverberations of the Yoknapatawpha saga. While granting this familiar assertion of Faulkner criticism, I would argue additionally that in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner departed from the single genesis to which all else was subordinated and—beckoned by 107

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Quentin Compson, newly "out of the attic"—created a structure of coordination that inscribes Sutpen and Quentin, the hero and the teller of the tale, in metaphorical identity. On another occasion at Virginia, Faulkner quite adequately accounts for Quentin as the second hero of the novel: "Every time any character gets into a book no matter how minor, he's actually telling his biography—that's all anyone ever does, he tells his own biography, talking about himself, in a thousand different terms, but himself. Quentin was still trying to get God to tell him why in Absalom, Absalom! as he was in The Sound and the Fury."2 T o the end of his life, Thomas Sutpen was asking the very same question. Both characters, the one in his life and the other in his telling of that life, were driven to demand from —and failing that, to impose upon—reality a purity and consistency that reality could not deliver. Still, they fail, falling on the "why?"—Sutpen writing his life as if it were a story, and Quentin living that story as if it were his life. This is not to make the currently fashionable observation that this is a narrative about the making of narratives; Absalom, Absalom! is not an experimental laboratory for trying out technique. Rather, Faulkner throws the whole weight of his novel toward an answer to those anguished "whys," an answer that lies in the relation of intelligibility to existence, of knowing to living, and which reveals itself only through the gradual and repeated disclosure of the structures of coordination—mimesis, metaphor, and myth—which strive to fix significance and insure that a story will not be just a story, a life not just any life. This is precisely the origination of Sutpen's great "design": the sudden recognition of his own anonymity. He is a ragged adolescent, unsure of his exact age and 108

Absalom, Absalom! without a history in time, attached to a drunken father and a pregnant, unmarried sister, with whom he has aimlessly moved through space from the frontier culture of West Virginia to the tidewater culture of Virginia. The description of this spatial progress shows how lost in time are the anonymous: ". . . and they not progressing parallel in time but descending perpendicularly through temperature and climate—a (you couldn't call it a period because as he remembered it or as he told Grandfather he did, it didn't have either a definite beginning or a definite ending. Maybe attenuation is better)—an attenuation from a kind of furious inertness and patient immobility . . . during which they did not seem to progress at all but just to hang suspended while the earth itself altered, flattened and broadened out of the mountain cove where they had all been born." 3 Until he is turned away from the white man's plantation door, Sutpen does not know that a life can generate and sustain a symbolic significance, which is the double conferral of social and biological order by the naming of the father. Before, he had assumed that social status was a matter of luck and therefore no man had the right to say to another, "Because I own this rifle, my arms and legs and blood and bones are superior to yours" (229). Before, he had not realized that the rich man must have been seeing him and his kind "as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity . . ." (235). Knowing now what is necessary, Sutpen erases the attenuation of anonymity in space and makes a new, proper beginning in time: he will make a name for himself. When years later he appears in Jefferson, he is yet 109

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of Time"

nameless. H e is the "man-horse-demon" of the "faint sulphur reek," against whom Rosa Coldfield rails; and because he appears "out of no discernible past," he evades all their understanding. Godlike, he reenacts all creation myths, wresting a plantation out of the wilderness before the astonished eyes of all Jefferson, saying his "Be Sutpen's H u n d r e d like the olden time Be Light" (8-9). Returning six years later, having stuffed the big house with the world's luxuries, Sutpen now requires the big wedding: "Sutpen wanted it. H e wanted, not the anonymous wife and the anonymous children, but the two names, the stainless wife and the unimpeachable fatherin-law, on the license, the patent" (p. 51). Once you get the name in writing, living need no longer be unsymbolic. A license endows one with the proprietary privilege of making one's own mark; paternity is a patent for the exclusive right of reproducing one's original making through the generations. Sutpen's "design" is so much an encoding and formulating of legal and social sanctions that it seems tautological to accuse him, as Grandfather Compson and Faulkner's readers have done, of an "abstract" morality. Humanistic explanations of the failure of that design are readily convincing, whether they are from the side of American history or from classical tragedy. I would rather consider Sutpen's "why did I fail?" not as a rhetorical question about historical complicity or tragic error, but rather as a real questioning of the hows of temporal process. At the level of the content, Sutpen's tragedy and the South's history may be read as the pollution of an idealized ethic of purity by the reality of miscegenation; all is lost for Sutpen and the South in the "one nigger Sutpen left." At the level of thought I am suggesting—the one that discloses the coordination between Sutpen and Quentin—all of 110

Absalom, Absalom! the following questions are reversible: How does order produce disorder (and disorder, order)? How does the name create anonymity (and anonymity, the name)? How does the same give way to difference (and difference, to the same)? Sutpen's life story is indicated in the main clauses of these questions, while Quentin's story of that life lies within the parentheses, only because the one begins prospectively and the other retrospectively. This is to say, that both are involved in the same process, but enter it from opposite ends of time. We have seen, in abbreviated reference to the beginning and ending terminals of Sutpen's family history, "the logical steps by which he had arrived at a result absolutely and forever incredible" (p. 262). It will take considerably more time and space to follow Quentin through that same process—a process by which he ends up identifying himself, incredibly, as Thomas Sutpen's son. Indeed, Sutpen is the "father" for all the Southern narrators—for Rosa Coldfield and Quentin's father Jason, in addition to Quentin—to the extent that they perceive the Sutpen family as a paradigm of the rise and fall, the virtues and defects, of the South, a paradigm which dominates their own self-definitions. In this sense, they are obsessed with Sutpen and cannot rid themselves of him, because they are obsessed with themselves. But they are all also driven by a more primary human compulsion—the desire to know one's origins— and here they cannot get to Sutpen. Having convinced themselves that his giganticism and inflexibility must disqualify Sutpen for a realistic narrative, they elevate him to the man of myth, the founding father—and thus find themselves in a double bind: for the center is absent, the origin is encased in a time that they cannot enter, retrieve, or comprehend—in a mythical time that 111

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is absolutely discontinuous with the historical time in which they draw breath. There are divergent perspectives on this Faulknerian time that I am calling "mythical." It is disastrous for those who are trying to live with it in the present, yet on the other hand superbly suited for storytellers trying to get a hold on the past. Jean-Paul Sartre, one of Faulkner's best and earliest critics, argues that the American writer's "metaphysic of time" is centered upon this unique view of the past as "hard, clear, and unchangeable," a rhetorical or poetic time that is divorced irremediably from the three-dimensional action of existential time. This present time becomes weakened, reduced, overwhelmed by the "super-presence" of the highly charged past. Experienced solely as an attenuation of the time of heroic potentiality, the present becomes "catastrophic." Faulkner, Sartre charges, has "decapitated time, deprived it of its future, that is, its dimension of deeds and freedom. . . . Faulkner's vision of the world can be compared to that of a man sitting in an open car and looking backwards." 4 Donald Sutherland agrees with Sartre that Faulkner's "real basis of composition is an absolute past, not a consecutive history," and muting the existential question, proceeds to argue for this past as having the exemplary capacity for the assumption of mythic contours: "I think that this hard and immobile past, separate both from us and from the continuity of history, is the only kind of past that convinces us. Abrupt and absolute, it has the 'density of being' required for legend, and as legend it very likely replaces for us in temporal terms the static Puritan theology." 5 For Faulkner's characters, then, the past is both obsessive and oppressive. It is also infinitely regressive, in the manner peculiar to myth, because the "sacred, ex112

Absalom, Absalom! emplary, and significant" subject of myth is primarily, but not exclusively, the origin of something. Mircea Eliade furnishes the authoritative statement of myth's authorization: "Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, a fabled time of the 'beginnings.' In other words, myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence. . . . Myth, then, is always an account of a 'creation'; it relates how something was produced, began to be." Structurally, every creation is a homologue of the original cosmogony, and all settlement gives form to the sacred act of Creation, making itself visible in the real world. Successful settlement demands force, effectiveness, and duration: these are the signs to the mythic consciousness that the sacred is manifesting itself in the world.0 Jefferson had watched this reenactment and had attached to the new sacred place, Sutpen's Hundred by torchlight, a "symbolism of the center," that defined it, like the temple or the divine city, as the meeting place of heaven, hell, and earth—-a zone, for the mythical consciousness, of absolute reality. For the Southern narrators, that center moved in a time as alien to the everyday world as the space marked out from it, and predictably so, Eliade would say, for the "transformation of profane into transcendent space is also that of concrete time into mythical time."7 Removal to Sutpen's Hundred does indeed enforce the sensation of being "out of time," of being discontinuous with one's contemporaries. When Ellen Coldfield becomes Sutpen's wife, she vanishes out of the "fluid cradle of events" into "a kind of jeering suspension," and she becomes "that foolish unreal voluble preserved woman now six years absent from the world . . . a perennial vacuum of arrested sun" (60, 70). Her daughter Judith is the "3

"Attenuation

of Time"

"young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness" (70); and her brother Henry, arrested in time and preserved like a crumbling ghost for forty-five years within the family home, thinks he has passed there but "four years." Sutpen's massive authority over his narrators' imaginations, I am suggesting, proceeds from the prestige accorded, even now, to the "beginnings" and the originating progenitor. As it was for archaic man, so it is for modern man, especially as he discovers himself at the indistinctive end of time, time attenuated from its origins in greatness. Yet, there is a certain way in which the first two narrators tame Sutpen, by submitting him to their own personal dispositions. Both Rosa Coldfield and Jason Compson tend to strike self-indulgent and self-dramatizing poses that, because of the reduction to their own subjectivity, invest Sutpen with an inferior mythical status. As a spinster terrified of the male and as a patriotic, amateur poetess of the Confederacy, Miss Rosa associates Sutpen with the nemesis of virgins and with the curse and glory of her own legendary South; and as an elegant, disillusioned Classicist and steady drinker, Jason Compson nurses his view of Sutpen as the victim of a hostile fatality. Thus, whether their visions of Sutpen are demonic or heroic, Rosa's outrage and Jason's despair signify the limits of what they can believe or imagine about Sutpen—although Faulkner, it is worth noting, reserves our awareness of their psychological motivation until after their paradigms for Sutpen have been firmly secured. Only with the advent of Quentin and his Canadian roommate at Harvard, Shreve McCannon, as collaborating narrators, do we begin to perceive the misguided fixations of the previous 114

Absalom, Absalom! two narrators. Quentin and Shreve neither simplify nor resolve the preceding narrative difficulties, but together they have a more powerful and freer imaginative vision which, given over to juridicial speculation, produces a more vital and articulated narrative of the Sutpen family. They, furthermore, seem to share the mythic belief that the "weak time" of the present may transcend, through recitation, the "strong time" of the past. This, Eliade reminds us, was a universal faith among primitive men: " H e who recites the origin myth is thereby steeped in the sacred atmosphere of those miraculous events. One emerges from profane chronological time to be 'contemporary of,' by 'living' the myths of sacred time." 8 By participating in the past, through story, one achieves power over it. By performing these double actions of detachment and immersion, Quentin and Shreve as narrators are at once less noticeably captive (especially Shreve, who is having a rollicking good time) and more obviously involved (especially Quentin, who seems determined to wring a transpersonal significance from Sutpen's story). Let us examine more closely these strategies of detachment and immersion. If Quentin and Shreve seem marked for success as tellers, it is because they employ two different approaches which, singly, deliver partial truths but, in tandem, hold out the promise for a full recovery of knowledge. I am referring to the historical method of rational induction and to ritualized reenactment grounded in mythic empathy. T h e historical method takes as its goal the correction of fragmentation, and by combining discrete facts into series of significant sequences, confers upon random happenings a meaningful chronology of cause and effect. T h e mythic approach, on the other hand, seeks the fusion of discontinuous "5

"Attenuation

of Time"

identities in ritual, at that one center of power where the past and present are inseparably one. Thus, the formula for the most powerful narration would put to the service of imaginative intensity both the intellectual detachment of the historian and the total emotional investment of mythic-poetic man. Certainly, if R. G. Collingwood's specification of the historical method is at all accurate, then Quentin and Shreve are the ideal historiographers of the Sutpen saga. T h e historian, according to Collingwood, is heir to the common belief that to know is to know the causes of things. His central concern, therefore, is to build a narrative that submits concrete facts in all their multiplicity to a temporal order. His authorities tell the historian of a phase in these processes, and he must interpolate the intermediate phases. He then shifts to his own powers, and constituting himself his own authority —that is, using his own criteria, his own rules of method, his own canons of relevance—the historiographer makes statements that are almost wholly inferences. In this manner, what he infers is essentially what he imagines: this allows Collingwood to say that "the historian's picture of the past is thus in every detail an imaginary picture," and that it is the activity of this "historical imagination" to confer upon its narrative a continuity that is not ornamental, but rather, structural. 9 So plausible and powerful are the dramatizations of these two narrators that the reader forgets they are often wholesale fictions—and forgets also that these "historians," in their imaginative reconstitution of linear time, are inevitably closer to the novelist than to the detective. 10 W h a t is immediately apparent with the change of narrators is a movement away from subjective mythologizing to a firmer ground in the historical past; rather than 116

Absalom, Absalom! submitting the past to the needs of their psyches, they will bring it into line with their historical present. The change in perspective is initially reflected by a shift in the subject of interest—a shift from a mythical figure to an historical plot. Obsessed solely with the figure of Sutpen, Rosa and Jason have isolated him within an abstract pattern as a timeless archetype removed from actual events. By focusing upon the relationships among his descendants through the generations, Quentin and Shreve get for themselves beings who are recognizably human and time-ridden, whose loyalties and conflicts are vitally existential. Judith, Henry, and Charles Bon act, as their father never did, out of need and love, thereby refuting Sutpen's chilling logic that dictated persons to be valued or discarded only in relation to his master plan. Sutpen's heirs, on the contrary, recommend themselves to us as historical figures precisely because they do not have a plan, because they so often act against themselves, and because they have such depths of patience and forbearance. Rooted to their time and place, they have interiorized its values, and therefore share in an inherited tradition that excludes their father and includes Southern families like the Sartorises and the Compsons. Having secured an historical index for their characters and having pieced together a plot out of their historical imaginations, Quentin and Shreve choose a narrative point of view, a mode of knowing, that "overpasses" the linked sequences of historical time in preference for the mythic ritual of fusion. The story is told through action rather than logic, the storytellers becoming the objects of their narration. Irrational fusion is the source of the obliteration of distinctions that obtains in the last third of the novel. Whether in Mississippi 117

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and New Orleans in the 1860s or in Cambridge in 1910, where there were two, now there are four—QuentinHenry and Shreve-Bon, Quentin-Bon and Shreve-Henry. T h e narrators' identities are similarly merged, so that it doesn't matter at all whether Quentin-Shreve talks or listens. For the time and space of their narration, those who tell the tale of the tribe live themselves in the mythos, overleaping the time gap and thereby enacting Faulkner's conviction that "time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was —only is."11 T h e ease with which Quentin and Shreve exchange identities should not obscure the very real difference in the nature of the experience for each of them. Faulkner takes care to underline the contrasting impact: Shreve's cheerful volubility and Quentin's brooding silences, the Canadian's vitality and the Southerner's weariness, Shreve's final ironic symbol of J i m Bond bleaching out over the generations and Quentin's despairing "nevermore of peace." It becomes apparent that Shreve's participation is the animated response of an artist who has felt himself equal to the challenge of creating a story. "Let me play a while now," he says to Quentin, with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy who wants to prove he can do it. H e is the storyteller as performer, his own best audience, and although it is his own voice that weaves the spell, Shreve himself is far from being spellbound. Incredulous before its bizarre incidents, Shreve continually steps back from his recitation to assume the mocking stance of an alien: "Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it. It's better than the theatre, isn't it. It's better than Ben H u r , isn't it" (217). For Shreve, as sleuth and master of ceremonies, the 118

Absalom, Absalom! Sutpen story is their joint creation; for Quentin, it is the resurrection of an ancient and recurring reiteration: "He knew it already, had learned it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, so that . . . it did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word for word, the resonant strings of remembering" (212-13). The narration of the Sutpen story has been a family legacy passed on from Compson grandfather to father to son, each family member increasingly aware that the dead Sutpens will always be "somehow a thousand times more potent and alive than he is," each one doomed through metaphorical comparison to an impotent present. In Quentin's case, however, there is an increment that escalates his particular entrapment in metaphor and the consequent existential reduction of his present: during the tale he has fused his self with Henry and Bon of the second Sutpen generation, he has been Sutpen's son in ritual, and after the tale he cannot forget this. Sutpen-as-father is his present, as it is not Shreve's, because it has ever been his past. If, like Shreve's life, Quentin's were a number of points leading along a linear axis from past to present, its processes developmental and evolutionary, then his present would be free and open-ended; the drama of his own existence would continue beyond the Sutpen story and displace it in a normal, metonymical escape into a healthy affirmation of self. But Quentin's identity is doubly bound by metaphor: by the general acknowledgement of Thomas Sutpen's paradigmatic power over the present, and by his unique experience, during the narration, of filiation through fusion. The particulars of Quentin's life are given, not in Absalom, Absalom!, but in The Sound and the Fury, and we need only to follow Faulkner's clue that Quen"9

"Attenuation of Time" tin is "telling his own biography," to find in that book the damning relevance that Henry and Bon must have for him as his brothers-in-fusion. The compelling arguments that connect Quentin's narration with his life are brought to light in John T. Irwin's recent study, Doubling and Incest JRepetition and Revenge. The psychological territory that Irwin traverses is too complex to be more than suggested here, yet an attempt at summary is worthwhile because it corroborates Quentin's paralysis by paradigm as the temporal consequence of the repetition-compulsion. The structure that is central to Faulkner's work, Irwin argues, is the "struggle between the father and son in the incest complex which is played out again and again in a series of spatial and temporal repetitions, a series of substantive doublings and reversals in which generation in time becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of revenge upon a substitute, the passing on from father to son of a fated repetition as a positive or negative inheritance."12 As a substitute for the Oedipal triangle of father/ mother/child, the triangle of brother-avenger/sister/ brother-seducer has at its core a narcissistic doubling, whereby the brother splits himself in two in order to experience simultaneously the satisfaction and punishment of a repressed incestuous desire. Thus, when Henry-Quentin finally halts Bon-Quentin at the gate of Sutpen's Hundred on his way to Judith, and when Quentin confronts his sister Caddy's seducer Dalton Ames on the Compson front porch, they are both performing the avenging duty refused by the father and at the same time confessing themselves as the incestuous lovers of their sisters. The crux of Quentin's dilemma in Absalom, Absalom! is not the spatial split of doubling (as it is in The Sound and the Fury) but rather the tem120

Absalom, Absalom! poral aspect in repetition. W h e n he merges his identity with those of Henry and Bon, Quentin is ratifying life as doomed repetition, past as prophecy, and time as a circle. T h e Sutpen story teaches him that this kind of vicious enclosure is devastatingly universal: the South after the Civil W a r turns in on itself, the family shows in its successive generations that all behavior is a return to a past pattern, each family member is encircled by his own psychological and sexual impotence. In seeking his revenge against time—the time which established the father's authority on the slender basis of simple anteriority—the envious son only extends time's mastery, never his own. All attempts to break the vicious circle only signal a regressive return: Wash Jones cuts down Sutpen, Henry shoots Charles Bon, and Quentin drowns himself. Quentin chooses eternal stasis as the only escape from a time that has gone circular. Having been a literal son, Quentin refuses to father a son and (despite his delusion of incest, which would have isolated himself and Caddy, like the Sutpen siblings, "together in torment" in a kind of family hell) dies alone, a virgin. In Absalom, Absalom!, having been a metaphorical son, Quentin in effect also smashes his watch, but perceives himself here as stopped by time—his narration in its ritualistic manifestation being a passive giving-in-to— rather than himself actively stopping time. T o summarize these epistemological and existential imperatives as Quentin perceives them, we may say that Quentin knows and therefore lives under the dominance of a structure of coordination, a paralyzing paradigm, that condemns the metaphorical son, with the biological sons, to repeat the synchronic pattern of family evil generated by the father. By becoming "contemporary of" Henry and Bon during his tale of the tribe, by merging 121

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his identity with the sons of the single genealogical family that contains the whole mythic significance of the South, Quentin finds himself at the dead end of metaphorical substitution. Yet (alternating with his existential sense of impotence) through this final section of the novel is a surge of power that Quentin demonstrates as a narrator. Quentin's mythmaking, contrary to the responsive passivity of Rosa and his father, is always a willful act of saying, "my voice operates thus, regardless of them and their sequence, regardless of them and their inviolate sanctity." His (and Shreve's) wholesale creation of character, scene, dialogue, motive, and event signals the authority of narrative over existence, the fatherrite of language over reality. In staking out his own original space within narration, in guaranteeing that the narrative he generates will be sustained, augmented, and completed under his paternal promise, Quentin imitates in narrative the action of Thomas Sutpen's life, and seeks to master time as he did. Eliade's qualities for successful mythic creation—force, effectiveness, duration—therefore apply not only to Sutpen's family dynasty but also to Quentin's narrative dynasty. T h i s is the second structure of coordination, uncovered by the book itself and revealed as the error that unites Sutpen and Quentin: the conviction that fathering as a metaphor can guarantee a pure consistency throughout dynasty. For Sutpen, fatherhood is the enabling metaphor that will correct the social injustice he suffered in his youth, and will confer the prestige and privilege denied him then. All of his energies—those avid, imperial motions directed toward making his metaphor consistent—are consumed in this crusade, and they are all futile. Sutpen never understands the reason for his failure because he 122

Absalom, Absalom! will never admit that diverse reality cannot be ordered under any single design for unity. More specifically, his "innocence" on this point is constituted in his refusal of the ambivalence in "fathering": in his case, the biological and metaphorical father cannot coincide because fatherhood in the South, as Marvin Backman starkly indicts it, is dishonestly, necessarily schismatic: A schism, a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, embedded itself deeply into the soul of the South. For the white man the Negress was the female animalized and the white woman was the female spiritualized. It was as if the planter was trying to make up to his white woman for his faithlessness and duplicity. Reality was two families by the planter, white and black. Reality was a brother who was not a brother, a sister who was not a sister, a wife who was not a wife. Southerners knew of this reality, accepted it, lived with it, even though it violated what they thought they believed in: honor, pride, the family, and the decencies of life. This reality underlies the story of the House of Sutpen.13 Sutpen has more than enough biologically descendant sons, and there is therefore no justification for his attempts to beget additional male heirs upon Rosa Coldfield and Milly Jones—except the necessary and sufficient motive of metaphor. Because of "black blood," a wife is discarded, a son orphaned, a brother murdered, and a sister widowed—a horrific spectacle of the biological father devouring the family that exists for him only as a metaphorical extension of himself. Sutpen's refusal of biological impurity and social hypocrisy is further compounded by his ignorance of another fundamental ambivalance in the very incident that motivated his design. 123

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Seeing only the social insult, he refuses to see the racial insult delivered at the plantation door—a door closed on him by a servant the same color as the men who laughed at his worn and patched clothes, who threw his drunken father out of taverns, whose mules ran his sister off the road. When a generation later Sutpen turns his own son away because of the biological mix in his blood, the design has turned back on itself, and we see that fatherhood-as-metaphor was stillborn, conceived in and bastardized by multiple impurities. T h e true source of Quentin's metaphorical identity with Sutpen is this same fathering ambition, which would refuse to acknowledge ambivalence, mix, impurity, and inconsistency. H e creates his story of Sutpen with the same totalizing will-to-power with which Sutpen lived his life. At the end of that life, Sutpen asks how his design produced disorder, how sameness created difference, how the name of Sutpen gave way to the anonymity of the J i m Bonds of the world. At the beginning of his story, Quentin neglects to inquire how it is that, through narrative, the disorder and anonymity of his own life will inevitably search out and establish the magical order and mythic name of its fathering. In a reversal of direction—Sutpen confusing his existence with a narrative, Quentin mixing u p his narrative with his life—both insist upon an impossible purity in the paternal promise that life again and again frustrates. Despite his frenetic denial to Shreve ("I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"), Quentin does hate the South—and he also loves it, just as he at once loves and hates, wishes to seduce and save, his sister Caddy. It is this rejection of ambivalence that will lead Quentin, only a few months beyond this book, to his suicidal leap in The Sound and the Fury. 124

Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner throws the entire weight of Absalom, Absalom! against this paternal arrogance. The book is at the same time a negative critique of the dynastic assumptions of Sutpen and Quentin, and a positive celebration of literature as the corrective to all ambitions of inhuman consistency. In both its structure and style, Absalom, Absalom! enacts a counterrhythm that reverses and underwrites and ultimately defeats the metaphorical designs of its principal characters. To begin the uncovering of this countercurrent, I would like to return to a suggestive response that Irwin makes to Freud's analysis of the instincts: "What characterizes the life instinct and the death instinct in terms of the compulsion to repeat is that they both seek through repetition to restore an earlier state which has been lost. . . . Freud asserts that in the light of the repetition compulsion, all instincts, both those of life and death, are regressive. And I think we are justified in adding that the form which this regression takes is the urge to do away with the category of difference"14 (the emphasis is mine). What I hope to show—after two brief excursions to outside authorities—is that Faulkner's novel is forever inscribing difference while his characters are writing sameness. Martin Heidegger's late essays are predominantly concerned with the relation of language to Being. Heidegger posits an initial splitting of Being through the "fall into language," a splintering operation that destroys the original unity and replaces it with linguistic polyvalency. Subsequently, man-in-the-world discovers a "nostalgia for the origin," a longing for the revelation in language of that lost place of Being. When the search for the origins proceeds, as it must, through language, the human investment is this obsessive impulse to get 125

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back to the One, to the "absent center." Heidegger thus defines art as a movement, as "the coming-to-pass-ofBeing" or aletheia, the place of the clearing where the Origin bursts out of its concealment within the mix of language. 13 Although Faulkner would obviously agree with Heidegger about the longing for Being and the search through language, he is much less sanguine about the success of the venture. For him language—and especially the making of narratives—is always the subtraction of being from Being and must therefore inevitably be the site of difference, the space of insufficiency, of language's ceaselessly unsuccessful approximation of the lost unity. T h e missing Father, who legitimates the quest as the T r u t h of the Word, is not to be found among the lying words of the world's time. T h e logical categories of sameness and difference also pertain to the relations within language. Roman Jakobson divides the whole of linguistic resources into the categories of metaphor and metonymy, the two axes along which we appropriate language, out of a need to express the same and the different. From along the vertical axis, we choose a word that is a substitute for others of the same class (metaphoric pole), and we make our sentences along a horizontal axis by combining words of mutually exclusive classes (metonymical pole). 16 We have already seen how the narrators' mythic and historical approaches to knowledge activate these twin poles of linguistic strategies: the aim of mythic enactment—to establish a unity through the analogy of identity—is metaphorical substitution; and the ambition of historical inquiry—the linear confinement of individually distinct parts—is metonymical completion. Quentin is trapped by his privileging of metaphor, and Shreve escapes through his emphasis on metonymy. Yet Absa126

Absalom, Absalom! lorn, Absalom! represents most inclusively, in its theme and language, the collapse of these two axes and the conversion of one into the other. The thematic conversion of metonymy to metaphor is more readily available: if the metonymical differences within historical temporality are apprehended within a potential frame of absolute, predictive consistency—as "fated repetition"— then difference is ever in service to sameness, and distinctions must fall to the aggrandizements of metaphor. This pejorative definition of metaphor, despite its inappropriate application elsewhere, seems to me to proceed directly from Faulkner's text. Metaphor is the rhetorical frame for Irwin's psychological doubling, whether it is the spatial split of the one-into-two (Henry and Bon) or the temporal repetition of the two-in-one (QuentinHenry and Quentin-Bon). Metaphor, furthermore, is the Heideggerean faith that language can retrieve Being and make it shine through the multiplying differentiations of metonymical combinations. Against this overwhelming regressive movement of metaphor toward sameness, Faulkner writes difference both large and small, in the structure and style of Absalom, Absalom!. His preferred method of conversion is to unhinge metaphor—Sutpen's, Quentin's, even his own—from its strictly substitutive locale, and by displacing it horizontally along the temporal axes of story and style, stretch that sameness within the rhythms of difference. Thus extended, metaphor begins to lose its absolute referentiality; it becomes reiterated rather than originally named, remembered rather than newly discovered, attenuated in its delayed reappearance. Severed from its solid mooring in the past and adrift now within the context of the linguistic present, the metaphor becomes a floating signifier of an analogy that has been 127

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drained o£ its original purity. 17 T h e adulteration here is happy (as opposed to the horrors it inspires in Quentin and Sutpen) because it releases from metaphor a surge of significance that is metonymical: it convinces the reader that in repetition there is always variation, and it offers this difference as a consolation for our raging appetite for, and also despair of, the same. One is never certain just how accurately a concrete passage can illustrate the always elusive abstractions of theoretical speculation, but perhaps the following lines from Faulkner's novel may serve that purpose. Here is the journey of the pebble of metaphor through the pools of metonymy: Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool, which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn't matter: the pebble's watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple space, to the old ineradicable rhythms. . . . (261) This passage seems to me exemplary because it enacts, in its exquisitely precarious and fragile balance, the minimal spacing that Faulkner inserts between being and Being. W i t h the slightest of nudges, it can be shifted to an avowal of metaphorical entrapment, precisely the sameness I want to show is being left behind. If we read it from the side of the pebble, then the pebble 128

Absalom, Absalom! as paradigm is everywhere and always. If we read its rhythms—the second, generous sentence reflecting within the swell of its qualifying clauses and phrases the promise of the initial sentence, that "nothing ever happens once and is finished"—then its cadences are all a celebration of the same. Then repetition becomes onerous, as it is for Quentin, who concludes despairingly in the lines following this passage: "Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us." But we can be freer than Quentin, as I think Faulkner wants us to be, if we perceive that repetition is but near-repetition, the synchronic assuming a slight diachronic tinge. There is a least difference separating the immediately adjacent synonyms of "old ineradicable," "infinite unchanging," and "moving on, spreading"—a tiniest wedge that reveals one member of each pair as spatial, the other temporal. The juxtaposition of "having seen, felt, remembered" suggests the sameness of simultaneity, until we recall the inevitable, if minimal, delay between perception and memory. Difference weaves its own rhythms through time—from the first to the second pool; through the changes in temperature, molecularity, and tone; through the modulations of the pebble's fall to its "watery echo." The triple naming of "different," nevertheless, is made to name sameness in the insistent parallels of its positionings. "Pebbleness," or metaphor, remains vitally open at the closure of the sentence (sentence closure being, as always for Faulkner, merely a bothersome semantic convention): if metaphor is of course "ineradicable," it is also "old" by now, reduced in power by the temporal fall through those metonymical rhythms that push it past identification. Pro129

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gressive prospects thus pervert regressive retrospects. Sutpen's design, ever present to him, is never present to us; the mythic Sutpen is irreducible fact to his narrators and the ultimate fantasy for the reader; ancient and preempted in their own eyes, the characters have future possibilities in ours. This dwindling of metaphor into metonymy, this seeking out of metaphor by metonymy—the former being a constant and almost imperceptible suggestion of a direction, the latter a bold and anguished compulsion—are the operations through which Faulkner at once sustains and subtly subverts the metaphorical structures that tie Quentin to Sutpen, as son-to-father and father-to-father. Sameness-in-difference (time displaces, but it does not resolve) is why Quentin's narrative finally does not supersede the previous ones, dedicated as it is "to that best of ratiocination which after all was a good deal like Sutpen's moralizing and Miss Coldfield's demonizing" (280). T h e difference between words and things, confersing the signifying function of language as unreliable, exposes the whole tissue of conjecture woven into Quentin and Shreve's narrative, "the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed anywhere" (303). And difference-in-sameness accounts for why Quentin as a duplication feels like a "backwards-looking ghost" and will soon enough be a corpse. In order to save himself, Quentin would have had to believe in the slippage of metaphor; only then might he have abandoned his quest for the origin and his deceptive powers as a narrator, and begun to live a life that embraced contingency with its future. As it is, his exemplary failure serves us notice of time's endless sub130

Absalom, Absalom! stitutions and displacements, its impetus toward difference, and its infinite deferral of significance, whereby T r u t h is ever at the end, never at the beginning. For it is only after the paternal ambition in life and story fails, that the myth of the Father can live forever. Myth, Faulkner would advise our authorities, is of the future, not in the past. Not in the myth made, but in the nevercompleted motions of the myth-in-the-making—in this book of Absalom, Absalom!, in this writing without Origin, Father, or T r u t h . Myth rises when Sutpen cannot control his life by a dominant design, when the narrators cannot encompass their stories with a paternal guarantee, when the reader cannot submit the novel to a homogeneous, irreversible reading, and when the author extols his own narrative unsuccess as the defeat of fathering-as-metaphor. Living myth is the object at the end of what Walter Slatoff has called Faulkner's "quest for failure." Concerning the composition of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner has said: "it was, I thought, a short story, something that could be done in about two pages, a thousand words, I found that I couldn't. I finished it the first time, and it wasn't right, so I wrote it again, and that was Quentin, that wasn't right. I wrote it again, that was Jason, that wasn't right, then I tried to let Faulkner do it, that still was wrong." 18 Against the success of Sutpen's "let there be," Faulkner says the "let it be" of his failure, the "right"/"write" of his concession ringing out the irony of literature, for which language is both cross and blessing. T h i s I take as Faulkner's submission to an experience central to his career as an artist: when language is merely approximate and narrative impurely sufficient, only then may literature offer its inevitable suggestiveness as the original seedbed of myth. Only after character, narrator, reader, !31

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and author all fail in "getting it right" ("write") can the book promote myth; only after the historical and literary investment in the genealogical imperative is comprehended as an inevitably recurring error can metaphor become true. It is on this point that Faulkner stops, having perhaps invented for the twentieth century that attenuated time, that time emptied of its previous riches, which pervades the modern sense of life and literature as an aftermath, as a "post-" everything. Nor does Faulkner, unlike Vladimir Nabokov, proceed beyond nostalgia and anger for the literary potential that might proceed from emptiness and exhaustion. Faulkner may celebrate the "eternal verities of the heart" in his Nobel acceptance speech, but he is too seriously sympathetic to the existential predicaments of his narrators, ever to believe wholly the literary assurances of endurance. Dissonance for Faulkner is crucial and excruciating, the cross born by true and doomed visionaries; for Nabokov, a language freed to fantasize an alternate world to this dreary existence, while carrying its own risks, is mostly fun.

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5 "A Colored Spiral in a Ball of Glass": Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or ArdorTA Family Chronicle

To come to Nabokov through Lawrence and Faulkner is to move from their difficult negotiations with the imperatives of genealogy to his carefree banishment of them from the realms of fiction. Here, where abolition forestalls accommodation, the genealogical imperative survives only in parodic disgrace—as the ironic subtitle of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, as a family tree riddled with incestuous scandal, as the defunct impotence of the traditional novel. Here, a critical rhetoric of tension and subversion will not suffice, and one must learn to speak of a rich plenitude within a strict economy, where all the sources of conflict have been dropped out. Absent is that resistance to closure which was demonstrated in the beginning-again-and-again of Lawrence's style and Faulkner's narrators; gone, that abrasiveness between material and strategy that made high drama of the slender victories of authorial design. Nabokov, to the contrary, enters in the fifth act, and—having given himself exactly what he needs—writes a novel that is entirely the elegant end moves of a triumphant tyrant who, in full possession of the territory, proceeds to civilize us all. From the standpoint of a cohesive unity of accomplished purpose then, Ada is as resounding a success as The Rainbow and Absalom, Absalom! are exemplary failures. (Which is perhaps only to say that one !33

"A Colored Spiral" can on occasion prefer Racine to Shakespeare.) We will therefore want to read Ada for the fullness and freedom that follow upon the removal of interior friction; but even in exile the genealogical imperative exacts its price, and we will also therefore want to ascertain precisely what Nabokov has had to pay for having it all his own way in this novel. Nabokov has exercised his seigneurial authority before Ada, of course, as a trickster-tyrant who can be taken for granted only at one's peril. T h e reader who comes to Ada from Lolita and Pale Fire has learned that Nabokov must be approached with that alert suspicion which Morse Peckham has characterized as the "game metaphor" of behavior, a mode of response that "reinforces the ability to take risks by handling unpredicted, unfamiliar, and novel situations." 1 T h e author has been proven risky, and the forewarned reader therefore moves warily through the typically Nabokovian prefatory appendages—a bogus blurb boosting the book, a formal and farcial family tree, a note of illogic from "Ed."— to arrive at the novel's first sentence, which stands Anna Karenina on its head ("All families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike"). Indeed, throughout the book, predictably on schedule, Nabokov scatters his potshot at Tolstoy, at Freud, at Byron, Chateaubriand, and their incestuously desirable sisters—just as he dots the novel with flip biographies of minor characters, frustrating asides to the reader, alternative "real" scenes in rapid succession, two worlds not quite symmetrically opposite, parodies of novelistic conventions, and so on, and so on. All of which would seem to suggest that Vladimir is u p to his old tricks again, calling for a reader who can track him down, ploy for ploy, to his den of deceit. Instead, what the 134

Ada, or Ardor reader learns to his relief and delight is that Nabokov is here seeking a participant, not an opponent, a collaborator rather than a contestant. In Ada's largest effects, Nabokov has suspended his usual game situation (in which he won, and his characters and readers lost) for a higher kind of fantasy-game in which everybody wins. Nobody is played, yet everybody plays, in a novel where play is in close conjunction with love, freedom, and timelessness. Ada is the offspring of Nabokov at his most expansive, when he gives u p tampering with reality in order to displace it with an imaginative universe maintained at the level of the ideal. In this project of total fathering, Nabokov conceives and sustains, in Richard Poirier's phrase, "a world elsewhere," in which he and his incestuous lovers, Ada and Van Veen, may happily dispense with the moral standards, psychological certainties, economic and social facts, and the time of the real world. Unlike the American authors whom Poirier discusses—who failed to resolve the tensions between the possibilities they envisioned and their own felt obligations to the conventions of expression, who "are always at some point forced to return their characters to prison" 2 —Nabokov performs the impossible, and tears down all jails of convention. Indeed, it is his zesty delight in performance that separates Nabokov here from contemporary craftsmen of fiction (like Barth and Borges), whom T o n y T a n n e r locates "on lexical playfields" in The City of Words. H e is much closer to Poirier's notion of "the performing self": Like Robert Frost, in Poirier's essay of that title, Nabokov is forever communicating in this novel "what a hell of a good time I had writing it." Art becomes the artist's action, a joyous exercise of personal power over reality. 3 "Innermost in man," Nabokov af135

"A Colored Spiral' firms, "is the spiritual pleasure derivable from the pos­ sibilities of out-tugging and outrunning gravity, of over­ coming or reenacting the earth's pull." 4 Nabokov's thrills are essentially those of the acrobat; it is in "acrobatic wonders" that physical and linguistic action coincide. To his hero, Nabokov has given his own schoolboy tal­ ent for walking on his hands, an antigravity feat that Van (as the masked explorer "Mascodagama") performs in nightclubs as a sidelight to his more sober college career. Nevertheless, the mature Van Veen, like Nabo­ kov, realizes that the final proving ground for the acro­ bat lies in language, and that the enemy is not space but time: "It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time" (SM, 14445). The battle, then, must be waged against the unidirectionality of Time, and the trophy is aesthetic pleas­ ure; historical time is to be dislodged from its place at the inner form of the novel. T o understand the nature of the energy Nabokov brings to this task, we have to shift attention from the artistic joys of making to the existential pleasures of remembrance. Not enough critics have noticed just how much Nabokov is nourished by nostalgia. William Gass, an exception, centers nostalgia as the "honest blood­ stream of his books, their skin his witty and wonderful 5 eye." Such an evaluation depends largely upon which books of Nabokov's you have your own eye on: the ear­ lier Russian or the later American, the fiction or the nonfiction. My own inclination is to place Ada in Ά direct line of descent from the two autobiographical novels now translated as Mary (Mashenka, 1926) and The Gift (Dar, 1937-1938), and from the autobiography 136

Ada, or Ardor Conclusive Evidence, which Nabokov wrote in 1947 and revised in 1966 as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. It seems to me biographically sound to suggest that behind Nabokov's dreams of conquering time and space in his autobiography, and behind their triumphant fulfillment in Ada, stand those exigencies in his own life that made him, after an idyllic childhood in Russia, a homeless refugee in his young maturity. The family's hasty emigration from Russia, his father's assassination three years later, his standing at Cambridge as a foreigner, his participation in the exile communities of Berlin and Paris—all these experiences Nabokov refers to as his "suitcase period," during which his only real possession was the "unreal estate" of his memories." I am not concerned to argue for nostalgia as the prime motivation of so various an artist at Nabokov; rather, what we seek to comprehend is how the needs of nostalgia—a nostalgia that informs almost every exquisite scene and almost every narrative act in Ada—dictate a displacement of the time basic to the classical novel. Because the nostalgic man must hold the past in the present in order to caress it, time must be fully and forever contained as a subjective function of memory. The chief memoirist of this memoir is Van (Ada surfaces occasionally as commentator), who has also written a philosophical treatise on Time, in which he asserts that "Time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong. 'To be' means to know one 'has been.' " 7 Nostalgic man does not recognize the temporal distance "from cradle to deathbed" as a straight line; and to preserve for Van that alternative "Time of the strong," Nabokov must !37

"A Colored Spiral" mount several offenses against linear, novelistic time: the time of memory must be separated from all spatial indexes, it must value the past almost religiously, and it must ignore the future. Reminiscence requires that T i m e become the problematic in Ada and, ultimately, the book's only subject. Nabokov's autobiography—a writing of identity as one who "has been," who remembers—presents a passionate record of Nabokov's abiding hatred for the objective time of the weak, and of his lifelong commitment to the rescue of time for subjective, elitist purposes. Speak, Memory in fact opens with an indictment against the prevailing, deadening sense of time as the chronometric measurement of the line of life: T h e cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. . . . Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. . . . I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. . . . T h a t this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted native. (SM, 19-20) It is only retrospectively that Van Veen can define time as "memory in the making," b u t long before nostalgia necessitated that definition for Nabokov, he was giving voice to that larger ambition for the "free world of timelessness." Nabokov records as his "first gleam of complete consciousness" the realization, at the age of four, that he shared with his much older parents a mobile 138

Ada, or Ardor environment of temporal flow, quite different from the spatial environment that all creation perceives. And the mature Nabokov then speculates that "the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile" (SM, 22). Nabokov smiles because he knows that time need not be tied to space; it can be made private, and privately set one free of the world's time. Given an originally keen perception, an inexhaustible imagination, and a memory bent on retrieval —both Nabokov and Van Veen can spin off into the freedom of timelessness. T h e trick, as John Shade of Pale Fire learned, is not to be trapped by the spatial notion of an arbitrary succession leading to an abyss, but rather to develop . . . the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, b u t texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. 8 T h e "real point" of a life or a text (of a life as "text") cannot be the plot, whose absurd outcome within Time's "spherical prison" is already given; rather, it is the counterpoint of "texture"—the sensuous detail sharply perceived, tenderly imagined, reverently recalled—that knocks down the prison walls. T h e almost pathological keenness of Nabokov's memory, which enables him to recall all the minutiae of an entire "patch of the past," is shared by Van Veen, whose treatise entitled " T h e T e x t u r e of T i m e " supplies what Nabokov has referred to as the "central rose-web" of A da* Both Nabokov's time and "Veen's T i m e " proceed from their ability and inclination to make the memory the home of the precious detail, whose colors may be evoked at will and lingered over, whose infinite subtleties of texture retard 139

"A Colored Spiral" the future and suffuse the present with a past that never passes. But this is to philosophize prematurely. In Ada Nabokov makes no such mistake: he withholds the "central rose-web" of Veen's T i m e until four hundred pages of the novel have gone by, and thus the reader must begin thinking about time where Van did—with Ada. His treatise on texture had its inception forty years before its publication date, in the games Ada taught him to play during the summer of 1884 in Ardis Park. It is Ada who initiates Van in those lessons which, as readers we come to learn, Van has faithfully applied in structuring his narration. Ada's first game demands a diligent, deliberate tuning of the senses to the present, such an attentiveness to the now-moment that thereafter all moments may be classified in a hierarchal order based upon the number and degree of sensations experienced: "An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: 'real things,' which were unfrequent and priceless; simply 'things' which formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost things,' also called 'fogs,' such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more real things occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture" (74). Memory, then, begins with perception, and the present flowers only for those who see and feel everything at the one point at which time and space are fused. In his maturity, Van learns to hate space so that he might caress time, but even he has to acknowledge that "the sharpest feeling of newness, in visual terms, is the deliberate possession of a segment of Space collected by 140

Ada, or Ardor the eye. This is Time's only contact with Space, but it has a far-reaching reverberation" (551). Only when one perceives with love all the details that constitute a "tower" will one have a memory of towers, thus the centrality of perception in Veen's Time: if every perception is but "a memory in the making," then the only reality of Time's texture is the "glittering now." The "now" that fails is responsible for memory's mistaken notions of time as linear or circular. Van's father Demon, for instance, has compressed all the moments of his three years with Ada's mother Marina into one "dizzy chasm," while Marina, with her corrupted fascination for stale melodrama, remembers the affair as "a dotted line of humdrum encounters." Unlike their parents, Van and Ada are destined for total success as memoirists because from the very beginning they have devoted their absolute attention to their present perceptions. Here is our proof, in the account of their first shared "tower" in that first summer: Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled. (When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French.) The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love's bread and butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar. "Real thing?" he asked. "Tower," she answered. And the wasp. The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing. 141

"A Colored Spiral' "We shall try to eat one later," she observed, "but it must be gorged to taste good. Of course, it can't sting your tongue. No animal will touch a person's tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man's tongue lying like that in the desert" (making a negligent gesture). "I doubt it." "It's a well-known mystery." Her hair was well brushed that day and sheened darkly in contrast with the lusterless pallor of her neck and arms. She wore the striped tee shirt which in his lone fantasies he especially liked to peel off her twisting torso. The oilcloth was divided into blue and white squares. A smear of honey stained what remained of the butter in its cool crock. "All right. And the third Real Thing?" She considered him. A fiery droplet in the wick of her mouth considered him. A three-colored velvet violet, of which she had done an aquarelle on the eve, considered him from its fluted crystal. She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him. Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Slowly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun. (75-76) As the years advance and the novel grows, the past becomes a generous chaos of potential real things, bridges, and towers. Any detail, regardless of its original place in space and time, may be called up in conjunction with any other detail. Summoned at random by the nostalgic Van, the liberated detail may find its niche in an almost infinite number of timeless towers built by memory in the time—if not the space—of the present. 142

Ada, or Ardor Here is Van in 1922, having begun in total perception and exercising now total recall, in full possession of the "unreal estate" of 1888, 1901, 1883, 1880, and 1884: [The past] ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer morning of 1922, can pick anything he pleases: diamonds scattered all over the parquet in 1888; a russet black-hatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901; a humid red rose among artificial ones in 1883; the pensive half-smile of a young English governess in 1880, neatly enclosing her charge's prepuce after the bedtime treat; a little girl, in 1884, licking the breakfast honey off the badly bitten nails of her spread fingers. . . . (545-46) This particular memory-tower includes Van's first crush, his first sexual conquest, and his sexual attraction to Lucette—but its foundation and apex are Ada. Given over to the "rapture of her identity," Van's memory enacts its associations in such a way that they all lead back to Ada. The retrieved detail performs a similar associative economy in relation to the narrative movement. Although it may combine and cluster where it will, the detail inevitably serves to excavate, for Van and reader, an entire stratum of scene and event. The memory's reflex becomes a narrative index. In introducing Van to her second game in Ardis Park, Ada has already shown him how he is to preserve and augment her identity. This game, which Van in his adolescent silliness refuses to play, is actually the game he will play all his life. Ada, taking up her pointed stick, says that the game is best played in the afternoon, 143

"A Colored Spiral" in order to get the longer shadows: "You outline my shadow behind me in the sand. I move. You outline it again. T h e n you mark out the next boundary" (52). In her twelve-year-old wisdom, Ada has charted, in terms of spatial movements, the temporal game to which Van will devote himself in the afternoon and evening of his life—the refinement of Ada's outlines. He learns her so well in those summers of 1884 and 1888 that when he meets the glittering stranger in 1904, she is reclaimed immediately as the pale-armed girl in black and as the pensive child before the drawing board (510-11); and when Van pursues all over the world a seventh-rate movie in which Ada appears in a walk-on as a stagy gypsy strumpet, her artificial and stiff gestures reveal only the grace of his past Adas. In becoming another or older Ada, she simply becomes more Ada, her shadows lengthened and deepened, not by time itself, but by Van's posture of absolute concentration. W h e n Van the philosopher finally gets down to conceptualizing his experience of Ada, he can assert with confidence that T i m e is but a function of "the tensewilled mind." T h e idea of "passing time," fostered by simplistic analogies with space, is false, for time accumulates in an immobile, imaginative, remembering present which possesses all time and all space potentially. There is, however, a real time that exists outside of this timelessness, in the " T e n d e r Interval." It is this gap between the beats—opposed to the mere yardstick measurement of time's rhythms of succession—that Van also seeks to grasp precisely and sensuously. He is convinced of "real time's being connected with the interval between events, not with their 'passage,' not with their blending, not with their shading the gap wherein the pure and impenetrable texture of time transpires" (257). 144

Ada, or Ardor Thus, Van defines real time—contrary to the time of subjective consciousness, which preserves the timeless detail—as occurring in the intervals between the great Ada-events of his biography: between the summers of 1884 and 1888; between 1888 and 1892, marked out by seven letters from Ada; between the two romantic interludes of 1892 and 1904; and between the postponement of 1904 and the final reunion of 1922. Defined in this manner, real time is not an adversary but rather a necessary and appreciated junior partner in the enterprise of memory. Memory must be grateful for the time of the interval, for life must turn the pages if the radiant text is to flash through all the tenses of the mind. Mind and reality need not be opposed, as long as the rhythms of the world cooperate unobtrusively with the projects of remembrance. This demotion does not permit time to structure Ada with the "life-line" common to the autobiography and Bildungsroman. The tempo and emphases proceeding from the conviction that life is a continuously evolving affair, or that the self develops only in interaction with other persons and the world, are absent from Ada. One can reconstruct, retrospectively, the biographies of the hero and heroine, but the reader is not given them. The long run is never significant, great stretches of time pass in a few sentences, the Ada-scenes and Van's tract on time dominate. If the reader willingly abides in the presence and present of Van's mnemonic obsessions, it is partially because he knows there is nothing likely to attract him in the intervals. Nabokov has deprived his plot of any kind of prospective titillation by giving everything at the beginning (a necessary prerequisite, I shall argue later, for any game strategy that confines itself to the realm of end moves). No more than Van 145

"A Colored Spiral" does the reader look to the future. Already precociously intellectual as children, Van and Ada quickly lose their sexual innocence and almost immediately become aware that their relationship is incestuous. With the foreknowledge that they are brother and sister (rather than the "cousins" the world believes them to be), the plot relinquishes its potential for complication. It can henceforth generate no suspense, no recognition scene, no melodramatic or tragic consequences, and no authorial irony directed at the lovers, since they themselves provide the long string of mocking allusions to incestuous coupling. Neither moral retribution nor responsibility, neither psychological explanation nor remorse, relieves or retards the course of their incestuous love. Nor does Nabokov permit any denouement: T h e reader learns near the end that the memoir has been published posthumously, b u t is given the deaths of neither Veen, who are presumed to have died "into the prose of the book or the poetry of its b l u r b " (587). Nabokov's hand is also evident at certain points in the plot when, fascinated by a "forking of time," 10 he presents two alternatives to the action, shrugging off the unreliability of the narration as the proper comeuppance to our notions of mimetic fidelity and "determinate schemes." Van rehearses speeches and writes letters that are never delivered; he writes a suicide note, puts an automatic pistol to his head—and it is converted to a pocket comb ("his destiny simply forked at that instant"); Ada's husband's immediate death is recorded, then his insult and the duel with Van from which he recovers ("here the forking swims in the mist"), and finally his "terminal" illness, which lasts for another seventeen years. Nevertheless, all this active inventiveness emerges in Ada as a minor and ancillary power 146

Ada, or Ardor in comparison with the perception and recall, amplified by love, of the radiant detail. All of Nabokov's devices for thwarting linearity are in service to the detail which, in art as in life, is forever threatened by the habitual, conventional, and deterministic structures of continuity. " T h e determinate scheme," says Van, "by stripping the sunrise of its surprise would erase all sunrays" (561). Nabokov's refusal to write a novel the way a bricklayer lays his bricks leaves Van's consciousness as the primary shaping influence on the novel's structure. It is because the details are all present to his mind, perfectly recalled and perfectly mobile, that their juxtaposition or layering mimes the "topsy-turvical coincidence" that is the true "contrapuntal theme" of Veen's T i m e as well as J o h n Shade's. T h e woman dressed in black and sitting alone, whom he has seen in bars since adolescence, turns out to be Lucette—-"as of something replayed by mistake . . . a wrong turn of time" (460). In 1884 Van perceives a "tower," a "pucker of paradise," when Ada sits down on his open palm; in 1888, riding home from a picnic with Lucette in his lap—"a set of coincidences slightly displaced; the artistry of asymmetry"—he feels again the pang of pleasure and has to chide himself "for having attempted to use a little pauper instead of the princess in the fairy tale" (113, 280-81). These two incidents are fairly representative of how Van's mind works and, therefore, how the narrative moves in Ada: once the detail is liberated from its spatial and temporal contexts, the genealogical imperative of narrative structure is rendered impotent, and the combinational possibilities favor almost any pattern but the linear—juxtaposition, superimposition, partial or exact duplication, modified repetition, simultaneity—as long as that "pattern" is not sustained beyond its coinciden147

"A Colored Spiral" tal, temporary nature. T h e most engaging exemplification of the detail's versatility occurs in a magnificent scene near the end of the book, Van and Ada's final reunion (much postponed) in Switzerland in 1922. T h e incredible richness and multiplicity of the associations is due to the fact that the reader's mind by now has become as "tense-willed" as Van's; and the detail, having passed through the time of the novel as well as the time of Van's life, swings freely among interlacements in space and clusters in time. All these—and much more— are present at their first "exploratory interview" in seventeen years: a 1905 cable, Percy du Prey's refused roses in 1888, the sun on the poplar in Ardis Park in 1884, Ada without panties in 1888, Ada scratching her 1884 mosquito bites, Lucette's face powder from 1905. There is the exact coincidence of their each having ordered the same model and color of car; there are the teasing shifts in repetition—the hotel has installed an elevator (although they have the same 1905 rooms) and replaced its huge oil of three Ledas with a neoprimitive masterpiece, the lake once frothy is now calm, the three villas that Van purchases on his way there are not the opulent brothels of his past (the Venus Villas) b u t are for Ada, the real thing. And when the disastrous evening is followed by the morning of their ultimate reconciliation, when we look down with Van to the balcony below and see Ada "all her flowers turned u p to him beaming"— we are seeing at the same time little Ada in the shattaltree in Ladore County, scratching herself raw from the itch of Chateaubriand's mosquito, and the Switzerland Ada, thirty-eight years older and in a state of undress, her sexual itch still unalleviated and her love for her brother undiminished. Such are the rewards of timeless148

Ada, or Ardor ness, accumulating from the free fall of the detail through memorial and narrative time. This is to say, in effect, that the detail, like the hero and heroine, has gone incestuous. Coupling where it will, cleaving temporarily here and there, making lateral moves on whatever's u p close, irresponsibly and playfully escaping the temporal and spatial orders to which it rightfully belongs—the detail likewise evades the genealogical imperative of regulated succession, and revels in incestuous connection, which Levi-Strauss pertinently defines as the "underdetermination of kinship." T h e detail defies the linear accommodation of narrative as steadfastly as Van and Ada refuse their insertion within the family line. Both are sufficient and exclusive unto themselves, both defeat the incorporating tendencies of historical time, neither is at the service of a dynastic principle. Like the erotic couple, the erotic detail does not lend itself to domestication and socialization, will not be productive or procreative, and in general will not be put to work. T h e detail is at once defiantly free and notoriously receptive to chance. " T o replace chance by organization"—that is the single and grandest transformation that culture effects upon nature. Most contemporary anthropologists are inclined to accept Claude Levi-Strauss's complex demonstration of man's first step from nature to culture: the venture originates jointly in the taboo against incest and the rules for exogamous marriage. T h e origins of the incest taboo remain unknown—it is an infamous "answer without a question"—but its nature is very clear: it exhibits both the universality of a natural instinct, and the coerciveness of a normative cultural law. N o matter how amorphous and variously defined is the general taboo H9

"A Colored Spiral" on sexuality, the prohibition of incest is itself rigid, unambiguous, and universal. Man, separating himself from the animals, denies his sexual instincts when, instead of sharing all the women, he takes some as wives and gives others away in marriage. Women are the exchange commodity in a system of reciprocity, whether they are thought of as luxury items or as utilitarian objects. 11 Sexuality in general must be private and rarefied if the work of civilization is to go forward, and incest in particular has to be forbidden if biology and society are to "work" at their optimum levels—that is, for the survival of the species, and for the continuing health of the family as society's basic institution. From its very outset, civilization dictates that sexual coupling may not be random and promiscuous recreation, but that the sexual couple shall be defined in terms of parenthood, their union ratified by the social contract of marriage, and their duties arranged for the efficient transmission of genes and traditions to their progeny. Nabokov's numerous gibes at Tolstoy thus receive their proper context, and they are not far removed from Lawrence's jeers at "the old Leo": Anna Karenina's sexuality needs a defender, because Tolstoy's moral condemnation of adultery leaves no place for the celebration of sex in its nonutilitarian, spontaneous, and purely pleasurable aspects. However, incest, and not adultery, is the subject of Ada, and it remains for us a monstrous thought. Whatever restraints upon sexuality our present culture has happily removed, the incest prohibition is still very much with us. In the real world, warding off chaos, we have pledged ourselves to a system of alternatives that renders mutually exclusive the kinship bond of brother or husband, sister or wife. Furthermore, we are generally committed (with Tolstoy) to marriage and 150

Ada, or Ardor the family, productive work, informing our time with purpose, and fulfilling certain obligations to the human community we inhabit. This is the cultural organization in which the race of men preserves itself and makes its history, in which the genealogical family projects its legacy and fulfills its destiny, in which the realistic novel sustains and delivers its fictional universe. Dull in its decency, perhaps, but it appeals to our survivor's sense. How then is it that Van and Ada, clearly outlawed, are not also clearly abominable? In their hideous violation, how can they appear as the "unique super-imperial couple" which Ada says they are? The answer, of course, is that they could not delight, except for the fact that Nabokov has contrived, by effective but unobtrusive strategies, to ameliorate the impact of their incest. His techniques are, as always, full of mastery. One involves the offering of marriage as a terribly meager alternative to incestuous union. In Ada, the married couples are alienated and faithless (Daniel, Demon, Marina) or compatible but loveless (Ada and Vinelander). Sexuality does not survive its socialization. In addition, the family as an institution is noticeably absent. The history of the Veen family is "a genealogical farce" to which Van and Ada are heirs, and besides the "depraved" Veen children, there are no others in the novel. But Nabokov's master stroke at amelioration lies in stopping the genealogical farce with Van and Ada: they are determinedly childless. When the transgression involves only one generation and is uncompounded by reproduction, we are less moved to condemn it as a public atrocity. Our objections, it would seem, are themselves genealogical—objections to the burgeoning progeny that result from promiscuous inbreeding, tenyear-old grandmothers and daughters begat upon daugh15 1

"A Colored Spiral" ters. Childless, Van and Ada's continuing devotion over a lifetime of separation begins to resemble romantic ideas of what marriage should be. Moreover, in his rejection of fatherhood, Van is acting within the parameters of Veen's T i m e , which holds that "the future is a quack at the court of Chronos." Married, Van would be removed from the world of erotic play; sonned, he would be pushed out of his "flowering present." It is not that Ada is an overt plea for incest; it is simply that Nabokov so arranges its fictional world that, outside of the space and time cleared by Van and Ada together, there are only marital, familial, and social confinements. T h e freedom of Van and Ada, like that of the detail, has positive manifestations, beyond the purely negative one of detachment from a self-serving totality that threatens to swallow them up. This incestuous couple, having violated the either/or choice dictated by the incest taboo, also find it remarkably easy to ignore the old antimonies of psychological investigation. In them, sex and love, feeling and reason, sensuality and intellect—mutually exclusive in many normal people—serve to enhance each other. T h e autonomy of the lovers permits them to integrate qualities customarily dichotomous, and thereby actualize the maximum of their human potential. 12 But we do not have to go to humanistic psychology to discover how rare are the luxuries of both J and. Each Buddenbrook must learn that, within linear, existential time, all choices for something involve the leaving behind of other possibilities; if the family members are to embrace the future that already possesses and orients them, then their energies must be necessarily channeled toward the single, exclusive endeavor. Similarly, each detail, scene, and event in Buddenbrooks has its own unique place at one point on the !52

Ada, or Ardor time line, and if there is repetition (such as the Thursday night dinners), it always incorporates the changes wrought on the narrative element by the passing of historical time. Nor do notions of circular time seem to grant free and full versatility to character or detail; in a closed circuit, as Quentin Compson suffers it, repetition is compulsive, wearying, and totally inadequate as an index to significance. In Absalom, Absalom! the circle is not merely vicious, it is suicidal. If neither the line nor the circle then, what figure will properly account for the parallel autonomy and excellence of Nabokov's lovers and his radiant detail? Nabokov himself, in autobiographical self-reflection, supplies the explanatory image: "A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, that is how I see my life" (SM, 275). Less rigid and less exacting than either the line or the circle, the spiral allows for a certain slippage within its formal unity. Its sideways twist makes for spacing and delay, so that what is given up in space is given back in time. It records, among diverse moments in time, relative reversals and likenesses, so that both recurrence and variation contribute an enhancement of the richly multiple. Because it is asymmetrical, the spiral does not produce mirror images, but rather imperfect reflections and refractions, catching within its coils the effect of abundant layerings, of wayward surprises. Since time may be spun off at any point along its coils, since its open end refutes any circular enslavement by time, the spiral symbolizes whatever liberation is possible to the human spirit that must exist within a "spherical prison," a "ball of glass." In his adolescence, Nabokov tells us, he first thought of the spiral in connection with the Hegelian series of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. He realized that the third term could be enacted by a spiral, !53

"A Colored Spiral" which transcends the spirit and fact of opposition, while preserving the oppositions even as they are surpassed. " T h e spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this u p when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel's triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time" (SM, 2 7 5 ). 1 3 T h e most dramatic effects of the spiral in Ada result from Nabokov's various conversions of work into play. Play becomes the starting point of all spirals, and it is definitely reserved for the mature. Before Ada, love in the form of marriage was work; art as the conventional novel was work; and competitive gamesplaying, in Nabokov's own novels, was work. After Ada, freedom seems to be only a superior kind of play, one that has bid farewell to the traditional positions and oppositions. For Nabokov, eager to encompass a fullness without temporal index, the spiral represents the "artistry of asymmetry," an artistic control that follows only upon a truly new direction, one that is crablike in its movement—"a knight's move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror," 1 4 Ada's games in Ardis Park. Asymmetry and play have this in common: that neither has had a very good press. It is pertinent to recall that the moral prejudice against play arose in the same historical period (the nineteenth century) that produced the criterion of "realism" in the arts; this is to say, that the maintenance of strict distinctions between work and play partakes of the same logic that calls for a dependable reflection of reality in art. 15 Within both life and art, then, there are established binary systems of relationship—the one of fixed oppositions and the !54

Ada, or Ardor other of exacting duplications—which are incompatible with the movement toward openness of the spiral. Nabokov's inclination to play his art removes him from any sympathy with such symmetrical structuring. (One would have to go to Thomas Mann, not only for classical realism, but also for a clear appreciation of the concept of the "work of art.") For Nabokov, art and play are neither gratuitous, secondary realities, nor withdrawals into self-abandonment; instead, they share the arbitrary unpredictability which is the player-author's single chance to seize sovereignty and create the new. T i m e is both the enemy and the prize to be won. If Nabokov can disrupt Time's progress toward futuristic goals, and stop it in a moment that has no meaning external to itself, then he himself will have fathered time —the " T i m e of the strong." In refusing to be rushed toward any terminal climax and choosing instead to linger in the full present of the spiral's every moment, Nabokov seems to be opting for an oasis outside the mad pursuit of happiness. Eugen Fink uses the figure "oasis" to refer to the space of play, appropriating to play the same time-philosophy that sustains Ada: "In the autonomy of play'action there appears a possibility of human timelessness in time. T i m e is then experienced, not as a precipitate rush of successive events, but rather as the one full m o m e n t . .. a glimpse of eternity." 10 Play, freedom, love, timelessness—all carried within the coils of a spiral that spins off, unimpeded, into a "glimpse of eternity." It all sounds too good to be true, and of course it isn't. Still, one is tempted to linger among the spiral's motions and its colors, to throw up one's hands at Nabokov's marvelously perverse assumptions of privilege and abandon all serious disclaimers. However—speculation being the critic's oasis of play— !55

"A Colored Spiral" I would like to speculate now on Nabokov's spiral, stop its spin (for the first time in this study), and wonder a bit at the affinities this particular fictional game has with other games. T o begin with: the game of Utopia. Games, artificial and abstract by definition, are not supposed to do justice to the complexities of the real world, and Utopian blueprints are especially unencumbered by that obligation. Utopia exists in its own time and place, under its own laws of structure, and in its perfection is never the direct result of a prior, imperfect world, but rather an alternative that has been wheeled forward through time. Like Van's memory and Nabokov's novel, Utopia needs a previous world only at one point of reference, thereafter to spin off from it. Furthermore, Utopian thinking has an ambition beyond that of establishing a positive to balance out the negative of the old, abandoned world: it wants to think the never-before-imagined and make it happen, it insists on the move from saying to doing, from thought to literary praxis. 17 Nabokov's ambition, his sovereignty, his performance in A da appear from this angle to be very Utopian indeed. If his spiral ascends so merrily, effortlessly accommodating its cargo of all our most cherished wishes, it is perhaps because Nabokov has been playing out the grandest of wish-fulfillment fantasies, the Utopian dream. Utopian dreaming (the critic continues spinning) is not far removed from Edenic nostalgia; it is simply the other, identical end of the spherical prison, the exit rather than the entrance. Both paradises, fore and aft, furnish blueprints of a seductive second world—in this instance, an elite model of we-ness—and Ada seems as easily read as a speculation on an ideal future as a nostalgic retrieval of an ideal past. T h e conversions are 156

Ada, or Ardor almost effortless: memory is an analog of prophecy, remembrance is dream, the vanished Ardis Park is a lovers' heaven. Both instruct in the ways of transcendence, and both are expressions of essence in terms of existence, what Kenneth Burke analyzes as the "temporizing of essence."18 If one would know how to translate back and forth between logical and temporal vocabularies, Burke cautions, one must be aware of a double direction of exchange between concept and image: the search for essence can only be expressed in temporal terms as symbolic regression, an historicist "going-back" (to childhood or to play, for instance); conversely, given to retrospect, the rememberer conceptualizes his concern with the past as a seeking after the essential (as Van returns again and again to Ada, for the "rapture of her identity"). I would merely add, as a possible corollary, that the Utopian future, if not a hunting-ground, is a fine sticking-place for essence, for "a glimpse of eternity." And a prior/post symmetry between Eden and Utopia offers this additional bonus for Ada: in a novel theoretically devoted to its nonexistence, the future has been sneakily reinstated—a knight's move, if ever there was one, by a shifty master. Which announces chess, as a third twist in the speculator's spiral. The Utopian game in fiction has practically everything in common with other fantasy games, and practically nothing in common with competitive games. In sporting games, the player is alert to defend himself against whatever may be coming up next. He waits for his opponent's mistakes in order to exploit them, and winning and losing are as often a matter of chance and luck as of skill. Every play is a gamble on the unknown and the indeterminate right up to the very end. This description of the competitor is likewise a !57

"A Colored Spiral" fairly accurate sketch of the appropriate reader for many of Nabokov's novels, including his explicit "chess books," King, Queen, Knave and The Defense. If it cannot be matched to the responses of the reader to Ada, this is because Ada corresponds to a distinctly distilled chess, an elitist chess raised to its essential, atemporal power— the chess problem. William K. Wimsatt's extended definition of the chess problem sounds a startling resonance for Nabokov's novel as we have now spun it around: A rule of composition in any developed art is always economy—nothing needless or extraneous to the presiding purpose. This is one way of accounting for, or at least describing, the artificiality of the modern problem position, or its unlikeness to a game. A chess problem is still chess. It works by the rules of chess. It aims at a special distinction, but only in virtue of the rules. In a sophisticated chess problem the intrinsic machinery of the mate is its own disguise. A problem is a limited but very precise drama—in most instances controlled or shaped by the addition to the ordinary rules of some special stipulation (the simplest kind referring merely to the number of moves), and by the artistic ideals of single key move, of complexity in the play, and of economy. 19 A descriptive paraphrase of A da-as-chess-problem yields something like the following: In accordance with the "rules" of the novel, Nabokov has written the history of the lives of two lovers. They draw breath in a stringently economical universe, which has been stripped from the outset of everything b u t the final end moves of the two lovers who ("special stipulation") happen to be brother and sister. They are winners because (Nabo158

Ada, or Ardor kov's "single key move") they don't have to be timed by Time, because ("complexity in the play") their past is always in the present, and because ("economy") time is but a function of the narrator's memory. The "intrinsic machinery of the mate" operates through the random retrieval and association of the detail, which is the aesthetic action of an artist rebelling against the determinancies that threaten literature and life. However, in keeping with the high "sophistication" and "artificiality" of this fictional problem, that which is most evident, the uses of nostalgia, "is its own disguise"; that is, memory dedicates itself to remembering forward, to conceptualizing the essence of Utopian dream—a dream, and therefore this novel, in which there is little, if any, indeterminacy. Indeed, the notion that nags the reader as he moves through Ada is of a control in excess of what is required. Ada is so highly stylized, so radically simplified, so attractively streamlined, so manifestly destined for a happy close—in short, so overwhelmingly controlled—that one begins to reach for what has been dropped out. If we linger in Nabokov's coils and have no avid appetite for moving into the book's future, it is because the not yet is never held in suspense, but is always already given. Ada is all aftermath; despite its praises of the combinational possibilities of chance, the book's success was already determined prior to its beginning. Nabokov's revolt against the world's grim mandates secures, it seems, his own freedom, but not that of the reader, who is thereby deprived of alternatives, set up and led through predetermined paces. Before such tight techniques of order, such symmetrical repetitions of the part in the whole, such easy victories, the reader feels inclined to reinstate the imperfect, blemished, soiled, and trite 159

"A Colored Spiral" which has somewhere been left behind—to reestablish the outside reference that the novel refuses, to restore the freedom-to-fail that somehow happened before. What looked like underdetermination, from the side of nostalgia (the memory's free associations, the detail as promiscuous and incestuous, time without direction, erotic love between family members) now appears absolutely overdetermined, from the Utopian view of "the pure and flawless fulfillment of idea in construction." This, Wimsatt says, is the motive that delights both compiler and solver of chess problems. This shared appreciation of mastery, the admiration of a disciple for the master, represents the homage that every reader extends to Nabokov, despite any disturbing suspicion that coercion has never gone away, but only been made elegant and invisible. Cooperative participation in a mutual enterprise thus masks an aristocratic assumption of authority, wielded through airtight exclusions and determinations, by an author who professes to hate all rules. Certainly, Nabokov's rage against inevitability is passionate and genuine; and just as surely, his aesthetic representation of incest as transcendent is less a plea for incest than a campaign against a cultural rule. LeviStrauss confirms that "the fact of being a rule, completely independent of its modalities, is indeed the very essence of the incest prohibition."20 It is the intervention, he goes on to argue, by which culture affirms, on the side of group survival, the preeminence of social over natural, collective over individual, organization over the arbitrary. It is culture then, and not nature, that Nabokov would "picket," when he protests against conventions in general and the organization of individuals for collective ends. He refuses for Ada the func160

Ada, or Ardor tion of the woman as the unit of exchange circulating within a "system of the scarce product"; He situates her in an exclusive world of superabundance, of which her nature, not her function, is the marker. Against functionalism—against the outcome posited by one's having a certain position in a structure—Nabokov gambles on the innate characteristic, the eroticism of Ada's identity. To secure this rapt rapture, he must imply that incest is "natural" (or, in this book, "Utopian" and "ideal") and that nature is without rules. Nabokov's error—and I think it is also Levi-Strauss's —is not to understand that, at the level of system, nature and culture are never in opposition. The biological restraints operating within natural systems are as much a cybernetically closed system as the rules of reciprocity that operate in the cultural exchange of marriageable women. Nature already makes always the distinctions between alliance and descent; and culture, in making its rules, is merely filling the natural forms with social content. Language is the marker—that which can say no— that gives a secondary articulation to what is already a genetically self-regulating system, with its own turn-off valves of negative feedback. The structures of kinship that Levi-Strauss uncovers are, in effect, gene-circulating pools that ensure the group's existence. The incest taboo, therefore, is not the marker of difference between nature and culture, but rather the occurrence that effects the passage between the two systems. Nor should we make a similar mistake and read an either/or formulation into Ada, as either overdetermined or underdetermined, as either memory or futurefantasy, as either rule-ridden or ruleless. What Nabokov wants for his incestuous lovers is freedom, timelessness, and plenitude, and he thinks he can get these by expell161

Ά Colored Spiral" ing system and culture. He gets his spiral by twisting it irreversibly in one direction, on one side, by offering incestuous love exclusively as the "zaychick (sun-blick) of the smiling spirit"; what he does not want to acknowl­ edge at the level of thought is that eroticism and death are born at the same time, both in culture and in nature, and that synchronicity always prevails within this double articulation. (One thinks of Georges Bataille's radical analyses in Death and Sensuality as the opposite polar position.) But Nabokov draws better than he thinks. Distin­ guishing reality from the wish, he ultimately and gaily delivers the synchronic double articulation. The spiral, branching all the way he wants it, confronts another spiral, branching in the opposite direction despite his wishes. The model for A da is not Nabokov's own willful spiral, but rather the double helix of the genetic code, of life and death, chance and necessity. As much as Na­ bokov works to retard its onslaught, the underwriting of the real slowly erodes or erases the overwriting of the ideal, causing the least slippage, just enough to measure the passing of time, the margin that forestalls inertia. The double helix receives its geographical ex­ pression in the two almost-mirror worlds of Terra and Antiterra, "with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other." The narra­ tive receives the mark of the second spiral when Van's bedside table begins to pile up with pills, when "raptur­ ous" love accumulates the descriptives of "hopeless" and "sunset," when the sibling-lovers' heaven ("Vaniada," with the Van in Nirvana and Ada in Eden) receives the additional entymological imprint of the Russian ada as "Hades," when Ada caps Van's philosophical logic of Time with the unfinished simile "It is like—." Ada or 162

Ada, or Ardor Ardor: A Family Chronicle is, finally, very much the consistently both)and book that Nabokov indicates in his title and subtitle: like nature and culture alike, it moves to the double rhythm of receiving and giving which finds its expression there, but not here, in the opposition of marriage and descent. Nabokov is perhaps that rare Einstein of those rare binary organizations which Levi-Strauss finds as the inversion of the ternary. He is doing that which is forbidden: he is thinking the rules. We do not think the incest rule—it is a monstrosity that goes against the whole possibility of social organization. Yet, in thinking out the play of the rules, as in a chess problem, Nabokov is laying out for us what hasn't been seen. H e is not here straining to get on the other side of a mirror, to establish rigid categories of opposition and identity; rather, he is letting us all in on the great secret that the world as it could be is only a slight twist, the merest space and delay, away from the world as it indeed is. In Cien anos de soledad Gabriel Garcia Marquez returns to the novel what Nabokov banished from it (and what we missed perhaps more than we knew): a burgeoning fictional world. Yet the hundred years he gives to his dynastic family is like no century recorded by the historian. Marquez subverts the genealogical imperative, not through a triumphant crescendo of style, but through a number of sophisticated returns to the primitive—to myth, to nature, to magic, to the mother. Neither Eden nor Utopia—constructs of desire built by weary, hopeful, acculturated man—was ever like Macondo.

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6 "Everything Is Known": Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

"Everything is known," intones the gypsy alchemist MeIquiades, but there is much that has been lost; and as the narrator of One Hundred Years of Solitude admits, "the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is difficult to find them."1 It is the recovery and the bringing to life of this "everything," which has been lost in the linear pursuits of genealogical order, that constitutes the aesthetic achievement of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Confronted with the presence of "everything" in the contemporary Latin American novel, the critics tend to account for its astonishing plenitude in one of two ways: either the novel is a perfect mimesis of a hyperreality, a realismo magico peculiar to Latin America, or the novel rises from the large imaginative ambition shared by many current novelists to create a fictional universe that is an alternative to the real one. Both approaches are worth exploring in relation to Marquez, but neither, it seems to me, will ultimately reveal the special strategies that make this particular novel so strange, so ebullient, and so subversive. Representative of the first critical bias is the Mexican novelist and critic, Carlos Fuentes, who traces the gigantism of the contemporary Latin American novel directly to the soil from which it springs. The cosmic na164

One Hundred Years of Solitude ture that meets the Latin American on all sides, Fuentes argues, is not so easily romanticized or tamed as are the navigable rivers and scalable mountains of Europe. A partial explanation for the conspicuous absence of moderation in the literature of the continent lies in the voraciousness of its tropical climate: "Who is going to think about the serenity of his soul while crossing a river of piranhas and awaiting the poisoned arrows of a tribe of naked Jivaros? And who would walk at his leisure through the Andes, except a frozen and starving army of San Martin?"2 The rampant power of the natural serves as a constant reminder to Latin American man that his civilization must coexist with the barbaric that has been elsewhere subdued. Not so many miles from the primitive Jivaros, one is certain to find a highly sophisticated urban culture, just as throughout the continent one encounters superstition thriving beside state Catholicism, military dictatorships and political assassinations surviving democratic constitutions, and primitive agriculture flourishing in the vicinity of advanced technological industry. If the resultant disjunctive reality seems phantasmagoric to the average European or North American, the ordinary Latin American accepts it with equanimity, for experience has taught him—in Alejo Carpentier's words—that Io real es Io maravilloso. His quotidian reality embraces the marvelous, miraculous, and legendary in a generous accommodation unfamiliar to those citizens of countries where culture has all but totally supplanted nature. The richness of poetic invention that we assume in this novel, then, may be no more than the total recall of its author's rich memories. Marquez himself has insisted that all of his stories are based upon personal experience, that most of them come from his boyhood, 165

"Everything Is Known" which he spent with his maternal grandparents in the Colombian town of Aracataca, and that since his grandfather's death when he was eight years old, "nothing interesting" has happened to him; and his interviewer confirms that "if he invents anything, it is almost by mistake."' Consider these "realities"—documented by his friend and critic, Mario Vargas Llosa—of the small Gabriel, which find their way into the adult Marquez' novel as "marvels": a grandfather who has murdered a man, fled in exile, and during his military campaigns fathered numerous bastard sons who continue to drop in at the family home for his grandmother's huge repasts; an aunt who, having been forewarned of the hour of her death, sets about sewing her shroud and then dies as scheduled; a grandmother who murmurs witches' tales in the dark and dies at an advanced old age, partially blind and totally insane. Furthermore, Gabriel lives in a house where the family ghosts take over the halls after six in the evening, lives in a town whose people seem evenly divided over the question of whether or not the earlier inhabitants were the victims of a wholesale massacre, and lives near a family who cover the shame of their daughter's elopement with the public announcement of her assumption into Heaven. 4 T h e "everything" that Marquez has known would seem incomprehensible to Thomas Mann, for instance, whose boyhood in the burgher city of Liibeck taught him the clearly defined limits of reality. T h e contemporary Latin American novelist differs from his older German counterpart in another area, which constitutes the second kind of critical attention the novel is presently receiving. Carlos Fuentes begins his study of the new Spanish-American novel with a remark about Thomas Mann, who, for him, "represents 166

One Hundred Years of Solitude the culmination of the European bourgeois novel, in the sense that he is the last great writer who can legitimately acclaim the conditions of his culture as universal categories."5 In the absence of those "universal categories" readily transferable to art, the modern artist now has a vacuum to fill. Why should he construct a likeness of a world that has emptied itself out, when he can exercise the royal prerogatives of an original maker? Borges has already shown the Latin American novelist that the great adventure lies not in documenting reality, but in founding within language a new Creation. And when the artist usurps God's Creation by his own, then he must be designated (as Vargas Llosa so designates Marquez in his book's title) a deicide, a murderer of God. Paul West, the North American novelist and critic, offers an equally startling image of the artist as a "cosmic gangster who, instead of imagining God from scratch, usurps the divine role by reimagining and reconstructing the whole of creation, not in any hope of actually changing it but in expressionistic protest against the inevitabilities that ignore or kill us all. Anti-Creations, I mean, in which the raccoon is a herbivore, acid turns litmus paper into gold foil, mc2 equals inertia."6 One Hundred Years of Solitude offers these supplements to West's examples: a town priest who levitates upon drinking cocoa, a child who is born with a pig's tail, a man who passes his life under a cloud of yellow butterflies, a town that is visited by the twin plagues of insomnia and amnesia. The novel is the "whole of creation" in both of the senses that West intends: it actualizes in its space a plenitude of possibilities unrecognized in real creation, and in its hundred years it encircles all of man's time, from Eden to Apocalypse. Both of these critical emphases—the one focusing on 167

"Everything Is Known" the wild reality of a continent, the other on the wild autonomy of the novelistic imagination—seek to explicate the "everything" of Melquiades' statement. I would like to shift the issue to how that everything "is known," because it seems to me that the initial and sufficient artifice of Marquez was to people his novel with characters and, especially a narrator, who have no volition or capacity for knowledge, as traditionally understood by the Western world. Absent from this novel are the articles of faith that stand prior to all historical and scientific pursuits of knowledge: the confidence that "things add up," that the singular and discrete element is always part of a larger, knowable totality of order, that the apparently random is inevitably calculable. In Macondo, facts never achieve the status of evidence, reasoning does not lead to effective generalization, causes appear as chancy and casual rather than necessary and regularized, actions are undertaken without anticipating obstacles or proposing goals. Because the typical Marquez character does not expect the past to predict the future, he expends his considerable energies in a purposeless, but very original, present. T i m e has revealed no general law or process to which he must subordinate his first impressions, and so he has neither the means nor the impulse to measure anything against a criterion not immediately given in the here and now. H e does not feel the need to establish degrees of reality or laws of causality, in a hierarchy going from particular to abstract: the facticity and presence of a conglomerate of things, equally coexistent, are sufficient in themselves. W h a t I have been describing is man before he has acquired a sense of time as a linear order, the prerequisite for an historical consicousness. Jaime Mejia Duque 168

One Hundred Years of Solitude confirms that "for the Latin American consciousness, history is not lineal," and he argues further that because Latin America has preserved within its social structures whole epochs which in the Western world passed by in successive order, Latin American man knows only the reality of simultaneity, never the reality of succession and continuity. 7 W h a t Marquez has done to escalate this anachronistic modernity is to make daily probability seem as foreign as historical necessity. T h e plague of amnesia that hits the inhabitants of Macondo signifies more generally the nature of their being in the world. In their valiant struggle against the fearful loss of memory (that agent of the historical sense in its most common manifestation), they turn to the fortuneteller Pilar Ternera to have their past read in her cards, and thus they "began to live in a world built upon the uncertain alternatives of the cards" (49). Failing to make the orderly distinctions that history and science demand, the men of the Buendia family naturally fail to insert themselves into the mainstream of Western civilization when it comes rushing into Macondo. They strike out, floundering, and their wild gyrations are an index of their incompatability with any schemes of progress. T h e founder of the family, Jose Arcadio, eagerly appropriates one gypsy "invention" after another, only to ignore its intended function and substitute his own grotesque misapplication. He attempts to use the magnet to extract gold from the earth, the magnifying glass to conduct solar warfare, the ice to build houses, and the daguerreotype to take a picture of God. Nor does his son the Colonel participate any more successfully in the organized Western aggression called war. H e never wins, is usually unaware of the location of the enemy's forces and his own, and after 169

"Everything Is Known" twenty years of bloodshed signs a treaty ratifying the original status quo. His nephew, the gentle schoolteacher Arcadio, turns into a harsh military commander, yet when he and his strutting toy soldiers are attacked ten months later, they are liquidated within thirty minutes. In taking the long way around to achieve near-zero effects, the Buendia men resemble the anonymous messenger at the beginning of the book who "crossed the mountains, got lost in the measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers, and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair, plague, and wild beasts until he found the route that joined the one used by the mules that carried the mail" (4). Also suggestive of the improvidence of their aspiration and accomplishment is the Buendia habit of making and breaking, of building only to take apart. The old Colonel melts and remakes his little gold fishes, Amaranta knits her shroud by day and unravels it by night, Ursula the matriarch retrieves and casts out her memories, Jose Arcadio works to translate Melquiades' parchments and then forgets them. There is, moreover, great excess that cannot be converted to purposefulness. The most exuberant sexual activity fails to produce offspring, or else there is a mindless proliferation of heirs; and the marathon entertainments of Aureliano Segundo are simply one manifestation of a family tendency to convert the efficiency of productive work into the exuberant nondirectiveness of play. Nevertheless, if the Buendias cannot "get ahead" in an historical world, they are masters of poise in meeting the outrageously "unreal" world they do live in. "It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and dis170

One Hundred Years of Solitude appointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay" (230). Thus, the Buendias do not try to ascertain "the limits of reality," but always—whatever happens next—they are prepared to cope. If the baby's basket begins to levitate, Jose Arcadio ties it to the leg of a table and continues his alchemical investigations; when Fernanda becomes aware that elves are moving her belongings around, she carefully ties down everything in the house; when the thirsty ghost of Prudencio Aguilar begins to haunt his murderer Jose Arcadio, Ursula makes sure that there is always a full water jar for him; and when the orphan Rebecca starts eating earth and whitewash as her exclusive diet, her adoptive mother Ursula matter-of-factly doses her with emetics and beatings. W h e n they do single something out for their concentrated attention, their choice of focus is customarily perverse. Jose Arcadio is too absorbed in his laboratory to notice the flying carpet sailing by his window, and he is so grieved at the news of Melquiades' death that he fails to notice that the gypsy messenger is turning "into a puddle of pestilential and smoking pitch" before he evaporates completely. Ursula's runaway son, Jose Arcadio II, returns home totally tatooed, with stories of his shipwreck, his venture into cannibalism, his sighting of a ghost ship—and Ursula's one response is: "and there was so much of a home here for you, my son . . . and so much food thrown to the hogs!" (94). T h e perspective I have been exercising—the kind of thinking that permits judgments like "unreal" or "perverse"—exists nowhere within the novel. It certainly does not proceed from the narrator. He is neutral, unobtrusive, steadfast, monochromatic, calm—manifesting qualities we usually associate with the "middle-distance" 171

"Everything Is Known" narrator in the novel of epic realism. T h e effect of his voice on the reader, however, is the extreme opposite of such a narrator, like Thomas Mann's for instance: it constantly recalls to the reader the great distance between himself and this fictional world. T h e Buddenbrooks narrator is similarly even in his tone, b u t he has collected, assessed, and integrated his materials, and assigned his characters a definable place in a reality ordered within a familial coherence like that of fathers to sons. T h e narrator of One Hundred Years of Solitude never exercises the decisive selectivity that follows upon the inevitable distinctions discovered by conceptualized thinking; instead, without comment and without missing a beat, he narrates the mingling of prodigious and miraculous happenings with village and household events within this heterogeneous reality, exuding an equanimity that betrays not irony nor compassion nor humor, b u t does most effectively destroy "the very idea of a possible barrier between the real and the imaginary." 8 T h u s the narrator is detached from what he narrates by means of the cool understatement of his voice, yet at the same time he is with the characters of the novel because he thinks like them. (This will become important later, when Marquez teases the reader about who the narrator might be.) Because the narrator does not think as we do—because his way of organizing knowledge, or failing to, is unlike our way—we do not grant him the omniscience we accord to the "objective" narrator of realistic fiction, who typically seems part of our world as readers and therefore serves as friendly guide into the world of the book. This narrator, like the characters in his acceptance of all things at the level of their conglomerate coexistence, is almost as close as the characters to Ernst 172

One Hundred Years of Solitude Cassirer's description of the mythical consciousness,9 and when he does try to make sense of reality (that is, make a narrative), he appropriates the narrative methods of men in prehistorical societies. In The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss calls this man a bricoleur, and contrasts him with his historical counterpart, the engineer. Unlike the engineer, who thinks with concepts and general laws, the bricoleur is something of a junkman: he thinks only with what is at hand, signs and images, and puts them together any which way without reference to any prior intellectual structuring.10 Adjacency and simultaneity, for instance, are sufficient proof of connection and identity for the bricoleur; therefore the narrator himself is totally uncritical when Aureliano Segundo assumes that an image of himself is no less real than he is, and registers no astonishment when Aureliano Segundo begins rifling through his wife's possessions, having felt a searing pain in his throat, for the doll she must surely have laced with needles. This kind of mythic thought will yield a narrative qualitatively different from that of Quentin Compson, for example, where the ritual action is mythical but the thought is historical, heavily impeded by reflection and reflexiveness. As it is, this is the fastest and most unimpeded narrative we are likely to meet in contemporary prose fiction. Because there is no empirical-theoretical mind on the premises to convert sequence to culmination, the narrative rushes headlong to whatever happens to happen next. Actions seem to occur without arrangement or selectivity, and they are never anticipated, summarized, or evaluated for the reader. This unalleviated succession qualifies One Hundred Years of Solitude as that narrative organization which Tzvetan Todorov has classified as the mythological. Like all narratives—excepting per*73

"Everything Is Known" haps only the ancient chronicles and annals—the structure with a mythological organization unfolds under the two principles of succession and transformation, b u t heavily favors the former. Succession develops its action from a series of discontinuous events whose units are put into relation on this one level, whereas transformation makes visible the paradigm for all change, whereby one term is converted into its opposite or contradictory one. T h e simplest of all narratives, the mythological concentrates upon the action, and differs from Todorov's remaining two organizations, the gnoseological and the ideological, on precisely this point. In these latter narrative structures, transformations acquire predominance over succession because they contribute to a search for knowledge, the emphasis now shifted from the event itself to the correct or incorrect perception of the event. (Todorov's examples of the gnoseological are the Grail legends, detective novels, and the works of Henry James; of the ideological, those allegorical or didactic works written under an abstract rule or idea conceived prior to the events. 11 Another way of saying this is that Marquez virtually collapses the metaphorical axis of language, leaving the figurative and symbolic, undistinguished from the literal sign, afloat within the same single, metonymical stream. Myth cannot thrust itself synchronically into this rapid and unhesitating narrative, and thus retard its changes, because it is already present among that flotsam of possibilities. T h e language of the novel is always demonstrating equivalence within contiguity, rather than in opposition to it. This aggressive linearity signals, therefore, not the triumph of linear order but its ultimate defeat. T o take the genealogical imperative seriously, the novelist must not merely generate a linear 174

One Hundred Years of Solitude structuring for his narrative, but must also assume a paternal control over its events. The events that Marquez aligns along his swift horizontal axis generate sequences acceptable to his "mythical" narrator and characters, but unacceptable to his historical reader. Deprived of the binary logic of the father, events lose their certification of legitimacy and become the bastards of process. In forcing the reader to examine his own requirements for knowledgability, Marquez exposes the genealogical imperative as a conceptualized—and not an organic—notion of narrative, very much in the service of knowledge rather than action. Before we look at the specific language in which Marquez carries forth his subversion of the line, I would like to end all this theorizing about narrative structure as "pre-paradigmatic thinking"12 by offering both a paradigm of the book's creation and a spatial configuration of its structure. Alchemy is a muted but pervasive concern throughout the book: Melquiades establishes an alchemical laboratory in the Buendia family home, and each generation thereafter has its resident alchemist. In his motivation, purpose, and use of materials, Marquez seems peculiarly akin to the alchemist. The medieval Churchmen were not fooled by the alchemists' protestations that they were merely continuing and extending God's work in the world. They knew that a declaration of independence lay behind each mad, inspired experiment; and the alchemists themselves believed that their transforming power depended upon their will and desire to remake the world, to bring to life and clarity all that was dead and opaque in it. Theirs was a rival creation, in competition with the Father. Their central project was to obtain, by opening up a single substance, two opposing *75

"Everything Is Known" materials, which were then analyzed, and finally forced to cooperate or interact within a new and higher substance. T h e i r slogan was solve et coagula, "divide and combine," and the preferred substance was mercury, which—following the tradition of Hermes—was manysided, changeable, deceitful, and inconstant. Containing all conceivable opposites, mercury was not only the primeval arcanum but also the ultima materia, and thus the goal of its own transformations. 13 A maker who brings forth a unity, out of diverse opposites, through transformations—this is a plausible enough description of Marquez the novelist. Similarly, "a circle with a twist in it" may be a fair enough figure to describe his novel, whose narrative structure is aggressively linear, whose central theme is the circularity of time, and whose fictional universe is irrevocably cut off from our own. T h e figure is a Moebius strip, a band which is given a half-twist before its ends are pasted together to form a circle, so that its "two sides" are always one surface. Along this single surface (the metonymical axis) are played the conversions, permutations, reorientations, and transformations of the pluralistic "everything," which genealogical order would have separated into the either /or categories of logical thought. T h e superior significance of the twist lies in its conversions of the inside to the outside, the central to the peripheral, which in their representation of disorder offer for our contemplation other possible orders contrary to the actual. T h e self-sufficiency of the novel—its solitude, one might say—is made abruptly clear in the last pages of the book, when the Moebius strip does a twist in time, which transforms the past into the future and thereby suggests a fantastic reading of the entire work. U p to 176

One Hundred Years of Solitude this point, the reader has assumed that the novel's content, however unconventional, represents a record of things past, written largely in the linear order common to the chronicle. T h e n , without warning, the historical record we have just finished reading is revealed as a prophecy written down at the beginning of the novel's events and accurately detailing the next one hundred years. T h e last Aureliano of the Buendia family line has finally broken the code of Melquiades' parchments and is reading about his apocalyptic doom as it is happening to him, and as the book closes upon itself. Traditionally, the narrator of a novel is telling us either what has happened or what he has remembered, and we are accustomed to assume, as with historical narratives, that the business of "knowing" the past is largely a matter of assigning plausible cause-effect relations among established facts. W i t h this conversion of the past to a visionary future where all is guessed, we are confronted with the probability that our unobtrusive narrator has taken things so calmly because he is one incarnation of the gypsy Melquiades, to whom "everything is known." H e has, moreover, in these manuscripts/this novel, abrogated historical time: Melquiades "had not put the events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant" (421). T h e epigraph attached to the parchments makes visible, "in one instant" of an ongoing present, both the beginning and the end of the Buendia's: " T h e first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants" (420). Just as the narrator has been catapulted from outside to inside this fictional world, so the historical reader—who has been confidently reading a mythical rendering of the past—is jolted into even deeper discontinuity by his 177

"Everything Is Known" mistrust of the inevitable uncertainties of prophetic utterance. With this twist in time, One Hundred Years of Solitude enacts its greatest subversion. T h e Moebius strip, of course, has been working throughout, within the local language of the novel, to empty the genealogical enterprise of its authority. Marquez has chosen to employ, as his favored linguistic vehicle, the one rhetorical device that is itself the sign of the kind of order I have been calling genealogical. I am referring to enumeration, which is Western man's expression of faith in knowledge as the establishment of an orderly succession of things. Any series or sequence is built upon inference: in reference to the beginning term (the father), each successive member of the series (his progeny) becomes increasingly predictive until the completion of the series, when certainty is reached and the connections have become inevitable. 14 T h e long enumerations of Garcia Marquez are deprived of this logic because the identity of their parts has not been established with reference to the differences among the "family" of things. When, within enumeration, everything is equally present in a kinship of undifferentiated aggregation, then the paternal promise of order becomes a farce, and the "family line" of language is exposed as an illegitimate, heterogeneous community of unruly orphans. From One Hundred Years of Solitude examples of enumeration can be excerpted almost at random. One recurring enumerative strategy is the parallel series, which arouses our expectations of a sequence of things of like degree, and then delivers a mix of the normal and the excessive, the quotidian and the miraculous: Her entire baggage consisted of a small trunk, a little rocking chair with small hand-painted flowers, 178

One Hundred Years of Solitude and a canvas sack which kept making a cloc-cloccloc sound, where she carried her parents' bones. (41-42) T h e house was filled with love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning or end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms. (67) They were new gypsies . . . with parrots painted all colors reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine, and a trained monkey who read minds, and the multiple-use sewing machine to sew on buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time. (16) Sometimes it is a matter of coordinate structures within the same sentence, the first presenting the literal and practical detail, the second—almost as an afterthought —twisting into the marvelous: It was also Jose Arcadio Buendia who decided during those years that they should plant almond trees instead of acacias on the street, and who discovered, without ever revealing it, a way to make them live forever. (40) On Friday at two in the afternoon the world lighted u p with a crazy crimson sun as harsh as brick dust and almost as cool as water, and it did not rain again for ten years. (336) Frequently, the Moebius strip conversion enforces the stolid acceptance of a deviant causal connection; it may 179

"Everything Is Known" be couched in the terms of either the macabre or the understated: There he took off his shirt, sat on the edge of the cot, and at three-fifteen in the afternoon, took his pistol and shot himself in the iodine circle that his personal physician had painted on his chest. At that moment in Macondo Ursula took the cover off the pot of milk on the stove, wondering why it was taking it so long to boil, and found it full of worms. "They've killed Aureliano!" she exclaimed. (182) It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days. . . . He had gone home for some minor matter on the night that Mr. Brown unleashed the storm, and Fernanda tried to help him with a half-blownout umbrella that she found in the closet. (320-21) Hyperbole is a continuing feature of the enumerations, and it is always, like the other twists in the enumerative strip, imbedded in a daily reality that meets it at either end. The only unresolved mystery in the book, the death of Jose Arcadio II, is introduced with the methodical, objective attention to detail characteristic of a detective of homicide. Then, without warning, this passage appears: A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to 180

One Hundred Years of Solitude the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jose, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. "Holy Mother of God!" Ursula shouted. (135) In the incident involving the town after the death of the family patriarch, the Moebius strip peels off its single sequence of heterogeneous elements and exemplifies in the process three of the author's favorite linguistic ploys—the rapid enumeration expanding into excess, the assignment of miraculous causes to real events, the return to small people doing ordinary activities: A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by. (144) In the larger area of plot movement, Marquez employs several techniques to accelerate the dizzying succession of disparate elements. Either pure chance or the most tenuous causal connection is sufficient to jump the story ahead for eons of historical or cosmic time. Ursula's chance discovery of the trade route, for example, 181

"Everything Is Known" converts Macondo from an Edenic pastoral village to a miniature nineteenth-century metropolis; and Mr. Brown's decision to close down the banana plantation brings the five-year deluge, which ends with Macondo's reclamation by devouring tropical nature. Or, Marquez may compress time with a wide-ranging summary of incidents, followed by a plot explosion in the present. In the case of the unexpected homecoming of Aureliano Jose (who, we want to recall, is Amaranta's nephew), the narrator offers random information about Macondo and its inhabitants before throwing out this final sentence: "That was how things were when Aureliano Jose deserted the federal troops in Nicaragua, signed on as a crewman on a German ship, and appeared in the kitchen of the house, sturdy as a horse, as dark and long-haired as an Indian, and with a secret determination to marry Amaranta." (151) There is one other major strategy that propels the narrative forward, its prime function being to hurry the reader through the narrative by announcing the inexplicable end of the story at the beginning. Vargas Llosa isolates fourteen of these "loops in time, which murder the end."15 The book begins with one: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." The reader gets to the discovery of ice by the end of the first chapter, having proceeded through a flashback history of the founding of Macondo, but he feels obliged to race through the next hundred pages before he finally reaches the absolute present of that announced future, the Colonel before the firing squad. Because of the loop, and not in spite of it, the narrative rushes forward with linear breathlessness. 182

One Hundred Years of Solitude This is notoriously not the case with the subjects of the narrative, the Buendia family, who passionately deny any dynastic destiny. The Buendias are not the Buddenbrooks. In a family where the best sexuality is the most unproductive and the most compelling attractions are incestuous, where the bastards are gathered in and the natural mothers excluded, where fatherhood is never more than a biological accident—in such a family the paternal promise to future generations never gets uttered. The Colonel's absent-minded impregnation of anonymous women, the begetting of the seventeen bastard Aurelianos, is only the most extreme example of the procreation-with-impunity that deprives fatherhood of any metaphorical significance in this novel. Paternity confers neither legitimacy nor legacy upon the Buendias, whose generations huddle in a kind of lumpish oneness, which defies the developmental and evolutionary rhythms implicit in the genealogical imperative. Orderly descent is further baffled by the confusing repetition from generation to generation of names, physical traits, and characteristic behavior. Every generation has its own Aurelianos, Arcadios, Amarantas, Joses, and Ursulas, its unmarried and incestuous ones, its dreamers and savage men, its resident alchemist—the same obsessions and the everlasting solitude. Almost as hereditary as the memory of Melquiades are the females who attract the Buendia men: three Buendias of two generations lust after Pilar Ternera, both brothers enjoy Petra Cotes, and a nephew and great-great nephew are tormented by Amaranta. When Aureliano the bastard throws himself upon the lap of his unacknowledged great-great grandmother, weeping over his desire for his unacknowledged aunt, Pilar the seeress interprets the Buendia fascination with incest as a circular retardation 183

"Everything Is

Known

of linear time: "a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling (sic) into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle" (402). Although the initial incestuous curse of the pig's tail is not realized until the seventh generation, the folly and ignorance of each generation produces a wild behavior that is at least as fearful. "It's the same as if you'd been born with the tail of a pig" is Ursula's despairing reiteration, as she perceives that the taboo, the transgression, and the punishment are enacted in every generation. She is the wise one who knows that familial progress is an illusion, that "time passes . . . but not so much." T h e r e is another large emphasis in One Hundred Years of Solitude that promotes the sense of time's "whirling circularity." It is the given reciprocity between man and nature, which accentuates his isolation from culture, and thereby elevates the circular rhythms of the cosmos over the linear movements of history. T h e cord connecting the human to the natural is unsevered between sexy Petra and her proliferating barnyard animals, between the gentle Mauricio and his attendant yellow butterflies, between Jose Arcadio and his protective chestnut tree. And when it appears that the stalwart matriarch is about to die, Nature prepares to m o u r n Ursula's passing in sympathetic disorder: " T h e roses smelled like goosefoot, a pod of chick peas fell down and the beans lay on the ground in a perfect geometric pattern in the shape of a starfish, and one night she saw a row of luminous orange disks pass across the sky" (349). In all these incidents there is assumed to exist between man and nature an unquestionable causal at184

One Hundred Years of Solitude tachment, which is at once unverifiable by science and unrecorded in man's histories—an affirmation of purpose that the characters of this novel are unable to assign to the processes of civilization. As death approaches for each Buendia, nature prepares a reunion, which makes explicit in an altogether literal fashion the Biblical understanding of man's time: "From dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." Jose Arcadio dies covered with mushrooms and fungus, Melquiades grows mossy awaiting death, and Jose Arcadio III reaches old age with his teeth coated in green slime. The last Buendia baby is but a dinner for the ants, his pig's tail accenting man's return down the evolutionary scale to the animal and vegetable. As if to remind us that all civilization will become cosmos and all creation return to chaos, the early founders of Macondo uncover an enormous Spanish galleon, symbol of the might of imperial Spain during the Siglo de Oro. On land where no sea should be, the galleon testifies to the unequivocal destiny of man and all his works: "Tilted slightly to starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers." (12) Humanity in cooperation with nature presents itself in opposition to both historical and patriarchal projects, in which the individual must exert his will over the environment in a relation of antagonism. With the 185

"Everything Is Known" withdrawal of the genealogical imperative—as in this novel—a new prerogative, that of cooperative accommodation, is free to extend itself indiscriminately throughout a natural biological community that is essentially fatherless. This manifestation would seem to be at once a very primitive state of natural affairs, prior to the social establishment of patriarchy, and a fact of postmodern culture, which follows the decline of the patriarchal enterprise. Patriarchy—as Robert Briffault argues in The Mothers—was a late development in man's history, a product of social evolution and therefore not representative of the original biological constituents of human society. Prior to patriarchal culture were the societies of the mothers, centered like animal societies around the mother and her offspring. T h e protraction of the infant child's immaturity, which kept him close to maternal care and affection, was a far-reaching factor in the evolution of the higher animals, a factor which Briffault makes central to his argument for the generally beneficent heritage we have from these maternal cultures: "All familial feeling, all group sympathy, the essential foundation, therefore, of social organization, is the direct product of prolonged maternal care, and does not exist apart from it." 10 Certainly, what we know of these primitive societies seems to indicate that the relation of the community to the individual was one of embrace rather than conflict: community property prevailed, families were loose and large within a cooperative tribal network, whose leaders and chiefs were mostly ornamental. Perhaps the easeful absence of differentiation in maternal culture can account for some of the strangeness in One Hundred Years of Solitude, to which the discriminations and directives of patriarchy seem so uni186

One Hundred Years of Solitude versally alien. The particular figure of care and endurance who dominates the book is the wife of the founder, Ursula Buendia. As we might expect in a narrative that continually confounds its characters within mythical and historical mixes, Ursula the mother often engages wholeheartedly in patriarchal projects of her own. Acting in his default for her husband, she brings capitalism to Macondo, she runs the family business of making candy, she takes the whip to her grown son. However, as she grows into the maternal wisdom that makes time circular, she encircles more and more of the world in maternal embrace. She blesses and records in the family album each one of her son's bastards, she keeps a generous table for all unannounced visitors and family prodigals, she expands the family home to accommodate each new generation. Her care is unquestioning, her lack of discrimination among family and political faction monumental, her intuition unmediated by conceptualization and unerring. By extension, Ursula's maternal care may be seen in its generalized aspect as the diffusive accommodation of "everything" by the narrative; like Ursula, the novel extends welcome to a richly abundant reality, regardless of its potential for dissonance and exclusion, and holds all chaos within community. Why, then, the "solitude" of its title? Its structural significance is indicated by the Moebius strip that severs its world from ours. Thematically, solitude may refer to a strategy of the individual will (Amaranta hardening her heart against all suitors) or to the consequences of power (the Colonel drawing the ten-foot circle of chalk around his person) or to the inner call of a different drummer (Jose Arcadio babbling under the chestnut tree in foreign tongues, or lost in the laboratory). And 187

"Everything Is Known" solitude in this novel surely points to a whole continent that resists assimilation in the Western race toward progress. Yet, just as surely, Marquez seems to be suggesting that the other side of historical failure is mythical hope, and the Latin America that does nothing usefully may become, through the very inutility for civilization of its totalizing view of man in nature, the birthing place of a sense of community, at once old and very new, that is maternal and ecological. Man, cooperating with his environment and living fully in the present, may institute the good circularity that will replace the bad circularity evidenced in the recurring idiocies of war and exploitation wrought by historical man in opposition to this world. Doubly armed with the technology to effect racial suicide and with this strange manner of situating himself against his environment, m a n will doom himself to extinction unless he develops a dis-arming way of thinking about the nature of order and organization as living systems. This is the warning sounded by Gregory Bateson who, proceeding from a theory of cybernetics, argues for a new conception of self, one which seems analogous to the sense of self that prevailed in primitive maternal cultures. All patrilinear projects assume a transcendent, self-contained individual who activates history by overcoming everything alien to himself. Bateson's new self, perceiving itself as an immanent part of multiple closed-circuit systems, would negate the old Cartesian dualisms completely and demonstrate the working together of brain and body, man and nature, nation and nation. T h e "bioenergetic self" that ended at its own fingertips must give way to the "cybernetic self" that is systemic and always in community. 17 T h e life history of each Buendia—suspended in a universe at once mythical and historical, and suspended also be188

One Hundred Years of Solitude tween maternal and patriarchal perspectives-—enacts just this conversion of the bioenergetic to the cybernetic self. Twist upon twist, the Moebius strip of the narrative converts their claims of egocentricity into a solid affirmation of their egocentricity within the biological, familial, social, and political systems of which they are a small part. Thus, the final condition of their solitude seems paradoxically to be the refusal of this new sense of community and the insistence upon the old sense of the isolated self. Contaminated by history, the Buendias (with Ursula certainly the large exception) ignore the natural community that their mode of thought intuits, until death returns them to the mother earth. In between those terminals and parallel with history is the Logos or W o r d of the Father, the word as written. It is preceded and superceded, at both ends of the primitive and the postmodern, by oral communication—by the storyteller of ancient times and by the electronic media of our own age. T h e r e has been more heat than light generated by the controversy over where the superior "new novel" is being written, in Latin America or in France, and the answers too often indicate nothing more than a nostalgia for amplitude or a reverence for technique. Comparison is pertinent here because, although both the nouveau roman and realismo mdgico revolt against the genealogical imperatives inherent in traditional plot and characterization and theme, they differ (not always and not exclusively) in their appropriation of the oral techniques that will supplant the written word. T h e French seem much more exclusively concerned with the exercises in pattern and surface and movement that they borrow from film, whereas the new Spanish novel tends to celebrate the original nourishment in oral "story" before it became written "plot." 189

"Everything Is Known" Certainly, One Hundred Years of Solitude would have been a boon to Walter Benjamin, who was mourning the death of the storyteller prior to World War II. The best written story, Benjamin avers, will be the one that differs least from the speech of many nameless storytellers. It will encompass the broadest spectrum of perspective and experience, exemplified long ago in the resident tiller of the soil and the trading seaman: the stay-at-home contributing the quotidian reality and the traditions of the past, the explorer offering the exotic and alien. Furthermore, unlike the novelist of the paternal word who is solitary and isolated, the storyteller is the man-in-community who has counsel for his audience because he is in touch with them and with "wisdom as it is woven into real life." There is a final distinction Benjamin makes, which perhaps best explains why the story of the Buendias would be so much to his liking. It is the distinction, valuable also to our final estimate of Cien anos as a triumphantly primitive postmodern novel, between storytelling and information: Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.18 190

One Hundred Years of Solitude Emotionally tied to the old forms of culture and committed to his preference for the exceptional and esoteric, and yet generously protective of any avant-garde text that had about it the sacred aura unavailable to language as logical proposition, Walter Benjamin might well have been Marquez' ideal reader. The "amplitude that information lacks" is a totally sufficient description of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Faced with the contrast between the neat and self-contained province of our ideas about reality, and the marvelous flux of the world before our reduction of it to manageability, Gabriel Garcia Marquez chose to kill the father and write from outside that world of the fathers which we have created for our own comfort and sanity. By rejecting the paternal guarantee of knowledge and by embracing the whole immediacy of "everything," he has severed the novel from its hidden alliance with knowledge and fused it once more to organic life, as it is lived beyond and before paternal deliberation.

19 1

CONCLUSION

Whither the Novel: The Wager on Surface

The disappearance of God, the end of history, the demise of man, the death of the novel, the murder of the father—these are the apocalyptic phrases by which we now measure the passage of our culture through time. To our own period we relegate the onerous burden of temporal belatedness—of being post-Christian, postindustrial, postmodern. And this burden would seem to be the necessary condition for knowing each of these deaths: they can be named only because they have already happened, because we who name them, like Nietzsche, are already aware that we come after the fact. Like the mythical events of every society, these deaths cannot be precisely located in time because they themselves have become the zero-degree markers from which our time proceeds. European man once thought that he could define his emergence into language and meaning, within the full positivity of history, as a fortunate fall into consciousness, one that signaled the first stage in the long genealogical journey of the spirit back to its lost home. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, and certainly by the beginning of the twentieth, Western man suddenly became aware that he had fallen out of history, and that language, the medium through which he had secured his thought and sense of community, had turned strange and unfathomable. It is impossible then to pin down the date of the event; like 192

The Wager on Surface the birth of self-consciousness that Rousseau reconstructs in the Second Discourse, the event has already happened and yet may never happen. Our very inability to locate ourselves and our culture in some space of displacement, in some temporal relation to that event, is the measure of the power it holds over us. It is thus not surprising that we constantly raise the questions of God, history, man, and the novel. The objects of those questions are the probes we insert into our culture, the measuring devices by which we hope to gather some information that would allow us to date the hour of the crisis we all feel around us. To ask whether the father is dead—whether we cannot now safely mummify his body in the museum of literary history—is therefore to give expression to a collective sense of living in the aftermath. Some might argue that the question itself is premature, for the father is currently enjoying some, if not many, survivors' benefits. Thematically, he not only survives but thrives. The immense and immediate popularity of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Alex Haley's Roots, and Taylor Caldwell's Captains and the Kings indicates that the father is still he from whom all blessings (and narratives) flow with nostalgic ease and Faustian excitation; nevertheless, the ready translation into the mass media of these novels argues against their having any formal significance specific to the genre. There are contemporary family novels that exhibit formal innovation and still retain the father as inspirational source or lost origin (I am thinking of John Gardner's Sunlight Dialogues and Jose Lezama Lima's Paradiso); however, the very sign of their narrative novelty is the banishment of the old genealogical imperatives from their structure. It appears certain that the high level of excellence within patrilineal narrative, as sustained by Thomas Mann, is at !93

Conclusion an end. Current imitations of his feat seem doomed to diminution, dwindling down their tortuous lengths to the continuous crises, prolonged pauses, interminable conversations, puerile psychologizing, and sensational sinning of a daytime television serial. (Even the skillful prose style of one such author could not forestall a reviewer from burying his recent family chronicle as "a mastodon of a novel.") Nor do our authors seem to share Thomas Mann's strenuous paternal responsibility for the artwork. One can readily see how opposed to Mann's sense of vocation is Lezama Lima's: "pride consists in following the mystery of a vocation, the happy humility of remaining in a labyrinth as if listening to a cantata of grace, not the will's doing some exercise with a rope." There are, of course, very willful postmodern novelists who prefer to keep the father around—half-alive, deformed, ridiculous—for the purposes of parody, parody directed less at the family as a social institution and more toward the frustration of the reader's comfortable expectations regarding the genealogical structure itself. In Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father an incestuous brother and sister drag through the city streets a gigantic 3,200 cubits of dead father who is still alive enough to be by turns assertive and nasty, wheedling and maudlin. The reader is as deaf to his dull, stale appeals as are his children, who ignore the Manual for Sons and bury him alive with a bulldozer. Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers is a sustained exercise in the erasure of the novel's heritage from the father: its author stops time from ticking, settles his detective-hero into a circular space warp that has him committing the murder he set out to investigate, and salts the book with Oedipal roles and riddles that defy all paternal solution. In Giles Goat194

The Wager on Surface Boy John Barth explicitly disowns the novel of his own begetting and presents it as a found series of computer tapes—the chronicle of George Giles, who had a virgin for a mother and a computer for a father, who passed his youth as a kid on a goat-farm, and who thereafter butts his way, under the restraints of parable, to an excessive and improbable destiny as the comic Son of a cosmic Father. The hero of M/F by Anthony Burgess inherits a paternal legacy which is dependent upon his willingness to embrace "creative miscegenation, excessive exogamy," in order to cancel out the family's disgraceful history of "twincest." Burgess' own "preparedness to risk incestuous conception" is everywhere evident in this narrative of doublings and duplications, which ends with a handful of possible morals ("help yourself, take several") tossed out to the reader. Since neither irreverence nor reflexivity is compatible with the formal imperatives of genealogy—and since both postures seem to be a staple of postmodern consciousness—I do not think that the forms they will eventually find for their expression can proceed from the father. But I do not intend that this study should end quite so simply with his burial, amid cheers or lamentation. I would much rather speculate upon the future of the novel without the father, and in this case, to look forward is actually to reflect backward upon one's own critical activity. The most fruitful methodological move at the end of a study proceeding from an idea about form, it seems to me, is to disengage oneself from that idea and expose its enabling assumption. If we can comprehend the logical genesis of genealogical thinking, then we will be in a better position to understand what large notion has dropped out and to hazard a guess, based upon the donnees of some postmodern novels, as !95

Conclusion to what has replaced it. Only in some such way may critical prophecy deserve an audience. We begin with Roland Barthes, who posits a conjunction between the death of the father and the death of narrative, reveals his premises, and offers his own prophecy: "Death of the father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflict with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?" 1 As postmodern a commentator as we might find, Barthes nevertheless shares a basic premise with an earlier and quite different critic, George Lukacs: the presupposition of duality. T h e subject/object dichotomy, the root of the contradictions of classical epistemology, prevails also in the realistic novel, which records the dualisms of human reality: life is a matter of "searching" (presence and absence), of "conflict" (the good and the bad), and of "dialectic" (the true and the false). Indeed, in his Theory of the Novel Lukacs argues that the birth of the novel depended upon the experiential and conceptual recognition of this splitting into binary antagonism. Only after man had lost his transcendental home in the universe and, despairing of the discrepancy between self and world, began his quest for their reconciliation, did the novel emerge as the literary form of this separation. Alienated man senses that it is only T i m e that separates meaning from existence, and it is in time that the fullness of life may be revealed through the struggles manifested in the human search for significance. Because of time, the movement from homelessness to homecoming is experienced as a rounded action that 196

The Wager on Surface effects the unity of the personality and the world; but because the novel's temporal mimesis is also ironic, it reveals this coherence as illusory, as "not a true-born organic relationship but a conceptual one which is abolished again and again." My sense is that most novelists insist rather more heavily than Lukacs does upon the conciliation of oppositions. However, whether divisiveness is the nature of human experience or whether it is but a moment on the way to reconciliation —whether, that is, one adopts a Kantian or Hegelian perspective—the point of departure remains one of ontological dualism. Only by starting from such a premise can one assign a place to literature that will privilege it over life; only by wishfully believing that literature can and should deliver the unity that life does not and cannot, does one generate the genealogical imperatives within story. Without the initial sense of life's dividedness, there would be no valorization of either the novel or the metaphorical father as authoritative integrators of lived discontinuities. As it is, life hands the traditional novelist a predisposition toward duality and the duty to correct it by showing the indissoluble connectedness within theme and structure. It is a burden that most critics likewise assume. Typically, the critic of the novel acknowledges its antagonisms as a prelude to their exemplary, if only partial, resolution. Thus, the novel is singled out repeatedly as the genre of self and world, internal and external, private and public, in order that we might be gratified by its creative resolution of these polarities. In this sense, all classical novels are novels of education and edification: the protagonist traces a maturing progress from tension to stability, in which the end of search, conflict, and dialectic is his dawning knowledge of life's !97

Conclusion significance. The traditional novel therefore is at once an immanent coming through, and a transcendent rising above, experience. The critic parallels this evolution of action into thought in his own progress through the experience of reading to an analysis of that experience. Because he tends to view his job of work as primarily interpretation, he proceeds under the aegis of another set of binary coordinates which might be termed "archaelogical": just as the protagonist rises above, so the critic digs below the surface, below the apparent and manifest, to reach the hidden and latent truths that are not immediately or perhaps ever given at the level of surface. In this manner the critic's excavation joins with the hero's transcendence to confirm the inherent, pervasive doubleness of the novel. It is instructive to watch an eminent critic as he moves out of a phase in which he was unselfconsciously participating in the customary dualistic assumptions of criticism, into a phase in which he exposes the premises and mechanisms of such a critical project. In an early essay, Tzvetan Todorov sets about distinguishing the classes of prose narrative and settles (happily for the dialectic) upon three: the mythological, the gnoseological, and the idealogical. In Todorov's scheme the traditional novel occupies the privileged position of the middle category, a mediation between two opposites, between the underdetermined action of primitive story and the overdetermined thought of allegory. The gnoseological is the single narrative formation (the novels of Henry James furnish the example) in which knowledge, neither ignored nor imposed, must be earned and proven through the length of the action.2 Thus, in his project of generic classification, Todorov identifies the novel as a synthesizing, unifying form, which gets it all in and 198

The Wager on Surface holds it all together in a resolution of extremes. When the same critic delivered the Christian Gauss lectures (entitled "Symbolism and Interpretation") at Princeton University in the autumn of 1977, he described the current state of criticism as an "interpretive delirium" brought on by an "obscurity demand" which has been promulgated by certain artists and critics since the advent of Romanticism. As the history of allegorical exegesis demonstrates, the justification for interpretation was located in the felt need of congruence between the present community and the literature of the past: if a literal reading might seem impious to the ancient or medieval mind, then the text was interpreted allegorically (as Homer was read, for instance) so that it might be conserved by being made "convenient to culture." Since then, individual authors have shared mutually with the reader a "principle of relevance" as necessarily informing the work of art, and the reader has recognized the necessity to interpret by taking his cue from the "indexes" of deficient or excessive relevance that the author supplies in the text. Recently, however (and Todorov merely sketches this in, his burden of proof lying with the nineteenth century), there seems to be a distinctly paranoid rage to interpret, even without indexes, that is coupled with the impossibility of doing so; there is not a dearth of interpretations but rather a proliferation of possible interpretations that cannot be accommodated to the neatness and clarity of allegorical specification. Perhaps because he is reading symbolists and surrealists rather than postmodernists, Todorov construes the strident insistence on indirect meaning as the continuance of a Romantic aesthetic that has always favored obscurity. The anti-interpretive projects of much con199

Conclusion temporary literature, it seems to me, are more profitably viewed as an attack upon Romantic obscurity, as indeed the first sustained revolt against the authority of the Romantic symbol. Against the old wager on the obscurity of depth, there is a new wager on the sufficiency of surface, a preparedness on the part of our novelists to invest the literary surface with the whole of reality, and thereby to insist upon the literalness of literature and life. If the novelist therefore develops strategies that at once trigger and frustrate the symbolizing process in the reader, the intention is to force the reader to take critical pause and reflect upon the fundamental assumptions about interpretation that got him into this bind in the first place. The path we have traveled to reach this interpretive impasse seems relatively explicit, and it involves novels as well as poems. For the Romantics and their heirs, the symbol was to the poem what the metaphorical father has been to narrative: both "caused" the unification of all the discrete elements and were thereby formal concentrates of literary power. The symbol's authority inhered in its fusion of the many in the one, in Coleridge's phrase, the holding of "multeity in unity." Contrary to the dynastic principle of narrative, which promotes the absolute determinacy of meaning, the symbol promised inexpressibility, ineffability, absolute indeterminacy. Because the symbol was ineffable, because it could not be exhausted by analysis, because its hidden depths were unplumbable, Romantic theorists produced an aesthetic that valorized both unity and obscurity, tying them to the same sticking-place, the symbol. As Matthew Arnold lamented, they did not know enough. Postmodern novelists now realize that the Romantics had at their disposal a way out of their mystifi200

The Wager on Surface cation which they chose not to take. To demystify the symbol and to uncover the fuzzy illogic of its unificatory appeal, what better weapon than the hateful trope that proceeds from the intellect rather than the imagination, and that is mechanical rather than organic in its form? Allegory offers a structure that first, rigidly separates surface and depth, literal and symbolic, said and unsaid, and second, absolutely determines and verifies a single meaning. In other words, in its unequivocal specification of duality and determinacy, allegory might be employed to expose first, the impossibility of unification and second, the needlessness of obscurity. To produce both these results, the allegorical mechanism must be perfectly transparent and, of course, it must malfunction. The divulgence and subsequent disfunction of allegory—this is a major technique for instructing the reader in a literature of the surface. It was a lesson first taught in this century by Kafka—ignored by his first generation of maniacally interpreting critics, but heeded by the second generation of critics, who understood that Kafka was not to be understood. Literature in the past, promising a homogeneous action and coherent meaning, delivered merely the bad myth of organic totality, which could be neither verified nor falsified and so dropped us, spinning out interpretations, into the uncharted abyss of obscurity. After Kafka (for whom the world falsified the myth), novelistic structure often becomes posted property: from this surface there shall be no rising above or delving beneath, for it already contains everything. Clear, limitless visibility presents its own growing pains, naturally, for character and reader alike. Unlike the spare surface of Kafka, contemporary surface is superabundant, more often than not, a mix and a mess, 201

Conclusion as maddening as it is magical. "Mere fact was killing him," says John Gardner of one of his characters. "He had facts corpuscular and facts crepuscular, messages from Newton and news from the company of table rappers, but the connector his Methodism longed for had vanished; the moral principle, the arc-flash, the man with the halo." 3 What has vanished, of course, is the genealogical imperative informing narrative structure. How is such a character (or better, reader) to be informed of the father's death, consoled for it, and then introduced and reconciled to the surface? A programmatic answer is provided by another of Gardner's characters, an incarnation of the authoritative father in a mutineering whaling captain who is better equipped than his predecessor to put down sedition. Captain Woolf reaffirms the genealogical imperative, implicitly recommends allegory as the new father-substitute, and predicts the defeat of allegory as an onerous victory for the indiscriminate surface: The ship, one must make one's crew believe, is of greater value than the life of any crew member. The ship is a creature with a life of its own, beyond our understanding, and each of us is merely a cell in that creature. The Captain is, perhaps, the brain —so he should have told them—but even the brain is subservient. The duty of every part of the ship —this he should have made clear—is absolute submission. The ship is the Father. . . . The ship's needs are our orthodoxy, and to any dissension from that orthodoxy we must respond with rigidity and no imagination. . . . Mark my words. Given enough imagination, a man may come even to sympathize with the whale.* 202

The Wager on Surface That we might "sympathize with the whale," beyond all tradition and judgment and self-interest—this is the aim of the postmodern project, sounding from beneath the magisterial tones of a Buddenbrook patriarch. To the unhappy, confused, and potentially mutinous reader, the novelist will respond with "rigidity and no imagination," with allegory as the Romantics pejoratively defined it, the last figural refuge of paternal austerity. Then when the allegorical fathering fails, as it must— its purity being the product of the simplification that inevitably pertains in the connection between any two poles—the reader will realize finally that the Father is dead and begin to explore the surface, perhaps even to grow to like it as much as the character in Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, who says that "it's better this way, spread out and receptive, spongy, the way everything is spongy as long as a person looks a lot and has good eyes."5 Allegory is the least spongy of figural receivers; unlike the absorbent symbol, it will take only one print in equivalency. The procedure for aborting the mechanism is therefore quick and clean: overdetermine the pole of transcendent meaning, and overload the immanent surface with a plethora of fact, detail, and event that resist connection, horizontally as well as vertically. The new narrative order—as heralded by Italo Calvino's title, Cosmicomics—then goes comic and cosmic, allegorical interpretation is either a colossal hoax or a grim joke, and reader and character are left wallowing on the surface. The collapse of allegory can generate diverse effects: from the one end, the impossibly elaborate paranoid systems of Thomas Pynchon; from the other, the "trashing" or victimization of discarded surfaces by Donald Barthelme. It is responsible for the emotional flat203

Conclusion ness and infinite regress in Borges, for characterizationas-cartoon in Coover, for the exhaustive catalogs and inventories of John Barth. Barth's Giles Goat-Boy supplies an excellent case in point, in terms of both artistic conception and critical reception. There is, first of all, an extreme escalation of allegory's prerogative to name (in the absence of the father). Stoker Giles, son of the hero, is here about his Father's business, spreading the paternal Word of Giles· ianism in this New Revised Syllabus, which relates how George Giles heard and answered the call to become the Grand Tutor who would bring all Studentdom on East and West Campus through Commencement Gate as Graduates. Allegory here is constantly on edge, exposed to the probable possibility of the father's impotence at the same time that His superpresence at the center of the book's language and thought is being cheered on in upper-case letters. As Barth zanily manipulates his monomyth, his goat-boy hero, blessed and cursed by an animal energy that is ready for everything, exhibits a talent for choosing the most irrelevant actions, and the reader's fun lies in seeing how Barth is going to fit these side-show gestures into the mainline of allegory. But this is not the only, or even majority, response to comic allegorization, and it is interesting to note how accurately an unappreciative critic describes the novel and demonstrates at the same time its total unacceptability to a Romantic aesthetic. What Bernard Bergonzi dislikes about Giles Goat-Boy is "notably, its crudity of vision, its basic thinness of texture, and above all its manic repetitiveness," and he pronounces the final Romantic anathema upon Barth by concluding that he has "an endlessly ramifying fancy, if little real imagination."6 If Barth is brittle and insistent, excessively play204

The Wager on Surface ing only within the lowest and highest frequencies and deliberately disdaining the mimetic middle, he may remind readers like Bergonzi of the mystified expectations they have always entertained of that mass band, the hidden hoards of symbolic treasure they hoped to mine there, and their mistaken faith in symbolic convergence. An active intelligence, coupled with a disposition to play, can be a great spoiler in literature. It also constitutes a rather good definition of that Fancy which the Romantics were so keen to abjure. Here is Coleridge, supporting Bergonzi, on the bad step-sister of Imagination: "fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice." To paraphrase Auden, the contemporary novel is a machine for making choices. Given the "aesthetic ultimacy" of its "post-" position, the novel has behind it a good many "fixities and definites" to play with, to shuffle, to try out. Vision is inclined to pre-torm the artwork, to complete it before its beginning, to stake out an elitist claim on essence; Fancy would rather perform, give itself over to forward impetus, skip along the surface, and keep alert for fortuitous accident. "Emancipated from the order of time and space," a kind of unreliable, freely associating memory, Fancy revels in its own self-sufficiency. When the novel is no longer the legitimate, secondary, and derivative offspring of the real world, and when the artistic spirit is no longer bound by the perception /reception duality of negative capability—then Fancy is back in business. Presently, it serves to trigger the inventiveness of an author whose historical voice and identity have 205

Conclusion been suspended. If a postmodern author is at all interested in the recent or remote past, he rewrites or reinvents it. In an ultimately unfathomable world, one should have the lucidity and good nature to salute all systems, including history, as obsessive mistakes. Anything, therefore, that has been sheltered under the umbrella of a single, shaping design—an event on record, a previous literary technique, a social convention—can be played with. From a critic of system-in-general, the author becomes a player of all systems; he fathers on the narrative rather than in it, and he has no hesitations about manipulation and control, letting it be known that life, if it wishes, may imitate his art, but the reverse need not apply. Evading the old paternal obligation to reproduce the materials and forms of an historical world (what John Gardner refers to as "that David Copperfield kind of crap"), the new author is not the good father who dutifully holds together his novelistic family, nor the superego or reality principle functioning under the aspect of rationality and causality, nor the ironic consciousness that revises the dream upwards for our waking acceptability. Instead, he is a Fancy man. Fancy-as-intellect has long been on the side of allegory which, as employed in postmodern fiction, is mostly a negative summation of where we have been and how we got to where we are. Fancy-as-impulse also has its place in the making of contemporary literature, as a positive ringer-in of novelty in narrative structure. Fancy gets the hunch that relationships might exist between heretofore exclusive classes of things, or that the discontinuous might turn out to be continuous, and Fancy wagers that a surface of undifferentiated space might accommodate all that had been discreetly outlawed by the time-line of genealogical narrative. It plays 206

Conclusion been suspended. If a postmodern author is at all interested in the recent or remote past, he rewrites or reinvents it. In an ultimately unfathomable world, one should have the lucidity and good nature to salute all systems, including history, as obsessive mistakes. Anything, therefore, that has been sheltered under the umbrella of a single, shaping design—an event on record, a previous literary technique, a social convention—can be played with. From a critic of system-in-general, the author becomes a player of all systems; he fathers on the narrative rather than in it, and he has no hesitations about manipulation and control, letting it be known that life, if it wishes, may imitate his art, but the reverse need not apply. Evading the old paternal obligation to reproduce the materials and forms of an historical world (what John Gardner refers to as "that David Copperfield kind of crap"), the new author is not the good father who dutifully holds together his novelistic family, nor the superego or reality principle functioning under the aspect of rationality and causality, nor the ironic consciousness that revises the dream upwards for our waking acceptability. Instead, he is a Fancy man. Fancy-as-intellect has long been on the side of allegory which, as employed in postmodern fiction, is mostly a negative summation of where we have been and how we got to where we are. Fancy-as-impulse also has its place in the making of contemporary literature, as a positive ringer-in of novelty in narrative structure. Fancy gets the hunch that relationships might exist between heretofore exclusive classes of things, or that the discontinuous might turn out to be continuous, and Fancy wagers that a surface of undifferentiated space might accommodate all that had been discreetly outlawed by the time-line of genealogical narrative. It plays 206

Conclusion play upon the same surface indifferently all that has been brought there from the "profound" depths— "shapes" and "rhythms," images and events, the synchronic and diachronic, metaphorical substitution and metonymical sequence. Simply put, the analogical consciousness would let metaphor function metonymically, and would replace an event with an image anywhere in a series of happenings. Why should author and reader be subjected to the dull, predictable sequences of Roland Barthes' proairetic code—those quotidian actionseries we remember and collect under generic titles such as "stroll, rendezvous, murder?" 8 Instead of detailing all the fussy gestures and dialogue contained in "a farewell," why not describe a painting, as Morelli advises, or as Cortazar accordingly does in his final scene, substitute for "suicide" a game of hopscotch? By the time Cortazar writes his 62: A Model Kit, his protagonist has so escalated the analogical consciousness that he is ready to displace narration with gesture, language with silence: Rather than beginning in some accredited fashion to tell his friends a story of the City, Juan wonders, what if as a substitute I took out my tie, rolled it up, put it in the hands of Polanco, and let him pass it among them? Or if, to satisfy their narrative expectations, I gave them that piece of banana pastry which is lying on this table?9 Once time is dispensable, so is narration, and novelistic space may be conceivably conceded to the pictorial. Naturally, if substitution by metaphor occurs along the plane customarily reserved for foreseen combinatory possibilities, then the new surface continuum will seem unreal or even surreal. Anthony Burgess is as eager as Cortazar to speculate on such a surface, and in M/F he initiates his own aberrant sequence with a letter-substitution game through which even a child might delight 208

The Wager on Surface in the binary exclusivity of language. In his word series a single letter change in each of the four words, which produces a progressive alteration of the meaning, implies at the same time an irreducible discontinuity between the words: "bread/broad/brood/blood." Nevertheless, we discover them much further along in the novel to have been continuous. When the protagonist comes upon a surrealist painting (executed, incidentally, not by his reprehensible literal father but by a father-substitute artist), the description is a pictorial analogue of the word series above: "A wrapped loaf reproduced itself like a living thing by the process of extending itself in space, trying to hold its offspring of miniature wrapped loaves with waxpaper wings, while their solidity deliquesced into blood that glistened in the candlelight as though newly shed."10 When the family brood can be broadened into bloody bread, the Buddenbrooks, Brangwens, Sutpens, Veens, and even the Buendias no longer have any dynastic credentials to present: the wager on surface has been won by a mad science of the concrete, in which metaphor does not transform but is itself transported along a continuum that acknowledges no genealogical descent. I have been suggesting that the effect, if not necessarily the intention, of much current fiction is the sensible suspension of dualistic thought. Sensible because the critic is not otherwise going to be able to read it without frustration, and sensible because hierarchy and subordination in service to transcendence seem to have reached a dead end in Western literature. If the father is merely one among many, if the figurative is no longer higher than the literal, if the relations between words and things are essentially underdetermined, then the critic may stop struggling and start looking. Once the bounda209

Conclusion ries are smudged, tilted, fused, or erased, the unraveling of order may be comprehended as a positive value—according to the familiar mimetic argument that it now seems more "natural" than the old "illusion" of paternal order. The obvious comparison is with the Freudian dream, in which no relationships are authorized, logical connection gives way to simultaneity, choice to a both/ and inclusiveness, and rational balance is precluded by the absence of the negative. Like the dream, the text of literal surface lends itself to almost any structure laid upon it; thus literary interpretation, like psychoanalysis, could go on indefinitely. I think, to the contrary, we are being urged to be content with surface, to consider as serious play these often opaque exercises in the heretofore ignored peripheralities of the hybrid, the noisy, the mongrel, and the arbitrary. We are all, it seems, in the soup together. The new novelist is not our father, but our brother, either as close rival or closest friend. A positive analysis of the situation might suggest that by insisting on this radical equality between himself and his reader, the new novelist is playing for an exemplary reciprocity that will be immediate and unmediated. His desymbolization of the father then might announce a general postmodern tendency to demetaphorize, demythologize, deconstruct our thinking about people and objects and events—a benevolent ambition to restore to the human community the space of the literal, which has been lost through our practice of investing too much of the real with our lust for transcendence. There is probably nothing intrinsically wrong in a culture's celebration of the diverse, the incongruous, the pluralistic; and there is certainly a great deal of interesting experiment on the side of adjacency, laterality, doubling, and repetition. Our writ210

The Wager on Surface ers seem no longer victimized by external pressures and internal desires, readers seem more willing to be challenged and cajoled. Perhaps, after all, from this mess of pottage there may arise not only the artistically new but also the humanly better. One wouldn't want to get too lyrical about this possibility, however. The negative estimate of our current situation also marshals powerful arguments. Perhaps the literary revolt against the paternal authority of narrative is but one more sign of a generalized drift away from all authority. Perhaps antilinearity in narrative is symptomatic of a prevailing ahistorical attitude that values only the fleeting present. Perhaps the new freedom is another disguise for ideological blindness. In the past the father has stood for the preeminence of the voice over the text, as a metaphor for presence, essence, and meaning. If the new novel refuses voice and vision, if it refuses connection with our world, then how can the anonymity and self-sufficiency of its writing speak to the human condition? Even should it have not severed the connections, the literature of the surface could not have commented on culture because, despite its abrasive or jolly negations of the fact, it converges with culture at one crucial point. That point of congruence is the undifferentiated equality of consumerism. The father-as-producer served literature well enough as an authority figure when we were seeking and finding a definition of man within a laboring society. At this later stage, however, the sons do not need to overthrow the father; they can simply outbuy him. When affluence makes consumption nearly universal, the young become contemporary with their parents, eroding the generation gap as they enjoy the same unearned objects and pleasures. In terms of con211

Conclusion sumerism, ours is basically a peer culture, a social relationship of equals similar to that envisioned by the novelist with his reader. The danger of undifferentiated equality is that anything and anyone can stand next to or take the place of anything or anyone else; this is to say that the duplicability of pattern and event in literature implies the interchangeability of all men within culture. This triggers a new drive to individualize: humankind begins to package itself as an attractive, new surface, and literature locates all its distinctiveness in the play and skill of formal technique. In a culture such as our own, in other words, the wager on surface is predictable. I am inclined to feel that the best part of that wager is the return to the literal, for reasons that are cultural more than literary. If the objects of success are desymbolized, human being will be freed to live its time, will no longer feel the need to mortgage or postpone the present for the future. In questioning, and often refusing, the paternal goals offered as the figurative prizes for achievement and acquisition, contemporary men and women will want to know the past also, perhaps as one would read a fever chart after the heat has subsided and one is clear-headed again. Literature has not yet caught up, I suspect, with those in the world who have reached the good health of the literal; too much of the literal in literature lends itself too readily to being regarded as a unique, self-contained commodity. But if postmodern fiction does not speak to and for culture, perhaps postmodern criticism can. It would require a rare, uncrabbed energy that welcomes change without seeking it for its own sake, that is nonplussed about finding the anti- in the pro-, and that disavows the anxieties attendant upon competition and influence. From the current 212

The Wager on Surface practice of a semiotics of the text (structuralism being the critic's wager on surface), it would shift to a new kind of genealogical reading—one that would trace the text back to the world, and put the world back into the text. The fear of the trace has become an essential feature of the new French criticism, justifiably so, because it threatens to dissolve the text, which has become reified as a closed system. By restoring the cultural content and supplying the missing referential linkages, the critic may lend the text a thickness that is neither figurative nor obscure, that marries the human time to the literary space. This new critic's statements will of course and gladly be subjective; the new value will adhere in their summation of the process through which we have passed—in their reverse genealogy which traces literary action back to human action, in an uncharted journey that knows no imperatives, perhaps not even those of departure and arrival.

213

Notes

INTRODUCTION WHENCE THE NOVEL: T H E GENEALOGICAL IMPERATIVE

i. See "Spatial Form in the Modern Novel," Critiques and Essays in Modern Fiction: 1920-51, edited by John W. Aldridge (New York: Ronald Press, 1952), p. 43. See also Sharon Spencer, Space, Time, and Structure in the Modern Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1971). 2. Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 263. The Theory of the Novel, edited by Philip Stevick (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 396, 405. 3. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 143. The large debt that this study owes to Professor Said's work extends back several years, during which time much of the material in his book was appearing in modified form in various journals. All theorists of the novel have had to deal with time, at one point or another. Those who have made it central to their discussions and whom I have found most helpful are the following: Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, translated by Anna Bostock (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1971); Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955); E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Harold ToIiver, Animate Illusions: Explorations of Narrative Structure (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974)—a book that should receive more attention than it has; J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). See also Eleanor N. Hutchens, "The Novel as Chronomorph," Novel (Spring 1972), pp. 215-24; and Jan Miel, "Temporal Form in the Novel," MLN (December 1969), pp. 916-30. 215

Notes,

Introduction

4. Animate Illusions, p. 48. Toliver is discussing this quotation from Kenneth Burke's Counter-statement (Los Altos, CaL: Hermes Publications, 1931), p. 42: "Truth in art is not the discovery of facts, not an addition to human knowledge in the scientific sense of the word. It is, rather, the exercise of human propriety, the formulation of symbols which rigidify our sense of poise and rhythm." 5. "The Nature of the Novel," Hudson Review 10:1 (Spring !957)- 23· 6. "Genealogy, Growth, and Other Metaphors," New Literary History, No. 3 (Spring 1970), pp. 351-64. See also William K. Wimsatt, "Organic Form: Some Questions about a Metaphor," in Organic Form: The Life of an Idea, edited by G. S. Rousseau (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 61-82. 7. Bronislaw Malinowski's article for the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica, which summarizes the earlier findings of anthropologists and sociologists, is reprinted in his Sex, Culture, and Myth (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), pp. 3-35. 8. Patriarcha and Other Political Works by Sir Robert Filmer, edited by Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949). 9. I find the social historians the most interesting of current writers on the family, after one has read Claude LeVi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated by James Harle Bell and Richard von Sturmer, edited by Rodney Needham Bell (Boston: Beacon, 1969). A partial listing of works that deal with the genealogical family would include the following: Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Random House, 1962); The Family in History, edited by Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975); Household and Family in Past Time, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973); Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Piatt, The Wish To Be Free: Society, Psyche, and Value Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976). Christopher Lasch has a three-part review essay of various books on the family in New York Review of Books (November 13, November 27, and December 11 issues in 1976). 2l6

Notes,

Introduction

10. Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 196a), p. 303. 11. The bibliography on time is staggering in its proportions, even after the measurement work by analytic philosophers and scientists is discounted. The following titles provide useful introductions to the general subject of cultural time: John Henry Raleigh, Time, Place, and Idea (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968); S.G.F. Brandon, History, Time, and Deity (New York: Manchester University Press, 1965); John Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948); The Philosophy of History in Our Time, edited by Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time (New York: Harper, 1959), particularly the introduction; Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), particularly chapter 3; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934); Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964). 12. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, p. 232. 13. Quoted anonymously in Stephen Toulmin and June Greenfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper, 1965), p. 29. This book is especially valuable for its emphasis on time as a factor in both social and intellectual history. 14. Science and Sanity (New York: Science Press, 1941). See also S. I. Hayakawa's essay on Korzybski in Language, Meaning, and Maturity (New York: Harper, 1954), pp. 217-24. 15. The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 49-50. 16. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971), chapters 1-3. 17. The "Discourse on Method" is readily available in a volume that offers comparative documents for a study of time in logic: Man and the Universe: The Philosophers of Science, edited by Saxe Cummins and Robert N. Linscott (New York: Washington Square Press, 1954), pp. 163-220. 18. For a deconstruction of historical consciousness and the argument for historiography as narrative, see Hayden White, Metahistory, The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 217

Notes,

Precursors

19. Pattern and Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society, edited by H. P. Rickman (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 85-86. The negative proof of Dilthey's life/history connection is exemplified in the autobiography of Henry Adams who, unable to find a meaningful coherence to his life, refused it also to history. I am grateful for the reminder of this connection between the two men to the historian John P. Diggins, who raises another provocative question: Are not autobiographies—like histories, but unlike novels—abandoned rather than finished? 20. "Three Problems of Fictional Form: First-Person Narration in David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn," in Experience in the Novel, English Institute Essays, edited by Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 33-34. The prenineteenth-century novel that seems to most seamlessly enact the conjunction of first-person narration and the genealogical imperative is Robinson Crusoe, in which the triumphant ordering and mastering of time is dispersed equally between prospective and retentive strategies of prayer/calculation and inventory/ justification. 21. "Literature and Discontinuity" in Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 173-74· 1. SUBVERTING THE FATHER: SOME NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRECURSORS

1. "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation," Critical Inquiry 1:2 (December 1974), 245-72. See also Rader's "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce and the Concept of Form in the Novel," in J. H. Matthews and Ralph Rader, Autobiography, Biography, and the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, !973)' PP- 29-72· 2. For this analysis of Robinson Crusoe, I owe a total debt to Josui Harari, whose remarks I reproduce from my notes on his lecture delivered in the summer of 1976 at the School of Criticism and Theory, University of California at Irvine. 3. Loren Eiseley's book, Darwin's Century (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1961) is a spirited survey of the impact of evolutionary theory upon all the sciences in the nineteenth century. Georges Poulet's introduction in Studies in Human Time, 2l8

Notes, Precursors translated by Elliott Coleman (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959) admirably analyzes the changes wrought upon private consciousness by the modern forces of secularization. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965) offers a very readable account of the scientific enforcements of linearity during the nineteenth century. 4. See Phillip Drew, "Charlotte Bronte as a Critic of Wuthering Heights," in The Brontes: A Collection of Critical £ssays, edited by Ian Gregor (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 44-58. See also Francis R. Hart, "The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel," in Experience in the Novel, English Institute Essays, edited by Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 83-105. 5. The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp. 158-59. 6. Leo Bersani, discussing character rather than structure in Wuthering Heights, introduces some insights about intimate inbreeding and disintegrating personality that enhance this analysis. The conflict he sees "between the desire to sever all connections with one's sources of being and to be always elsewhere . . . and, on the contrary, the desire to find oneself eternally in the same form" supports my distinction between the discontinuity effected by alliance and the supracontinuity of compulsive repetition. See A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 189-213. 7. See Ren6 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), pp. 1-52. 8. Gregory Bateson, in the several essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), develops the concept of a "cybernetic self" locked into a circuitry with the environment, in counterdistinction to the more common individualistic concept of the "bioenergetic self." 9. Philip Henderson, Samuel Butler, the Incarnate Bachelor (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1954), p. 164. 10. Compare Gabriel Josipovici's chapter on Proust in The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 1-51. 219

Notes,

Buddenbrooks

11. "Second Essay: 'Guilt,' 'Bad Conscience,' and the Like," in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 57-58. 2. THOMAS MANN: "LINKS IN A CHAIN"

1. La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1969), p. 22. 2. See Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 100 ff. Alter exposes the unself-consciousness of the linear domination in narrative, which he calls "Napoleonic." 3. See his Essays on Thomas Mann, translated by Stanley Mitchell (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965). 4. Monika Mann, Past and Present, translated by Frances F. Reid and Ruth Hein (New York: St. Martin's Press, i960), pp. 7- 35· 5. Ibid., p. 70. 6. A Sketch of My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, i960), P- 63. 7. "The Theme of the Joseph Novels," in Thomas Mann's Addresses, Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942-1949 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1965), p. 9. 8. See Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, translated by Nancy Metzel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 25-34. Minkowski argues convincingly that the human sense of continuity arises from existential experience, and that it mediates our various feelings about Time as the One and the Many. My own bias against philosophical exegesis follows from a similar conviction that life, not thought, "fathers" art and that any philosophical formulation becomes transmuted through narrative. There are, however, several studies of philosophical influence in Mann's works: Roger Archibald Nicholls, Nietzsche in the Early Work of Thomas Mann (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955); Fritz Kaufmann, Thomas Mann: The World as Will and Representation (Boston: Beacon, 1957); and Margaret Church, "Thomas Mann: The Circle of Time," in Time and 220

Notes, Buddenbrooks Reality: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), pp. 131-70. 9. A Sketch of My Life, p. 28. 10. Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 120. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically within the text. 11. "A Hypothesis on Kinship and Culture," in Kinship and Culture, edited by Francis L. K. Hsu (Chicago: Aldine, 1971), pp. 1-37. 12. The Ironic German: A Study of Thomas Mann (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), pp. 32-33. 13. Ibid., p. 20. 14. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1936), p. 308. 15. For a discussion of fictional strategies as erotic and antierotic, see Jean Ricardou, "Composition Discomposed," Critical Inquiry 2:1 (Autumn 1976), 79-91. In the same issue, see J. Hillis Miller's illuminating article, "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line," pp. 57-77. 16. For a fuller discussion of historical and social time, see Georges Gurvitch, The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1964); Jose1 Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, translated by James Cleugh (New York: Harper, 1961), especially "The Concept of the Generation"; and Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954); pp. 106 ff. 17. Fredric Jameson is currently investigating the correspondence of narratives with social forms and the ideology of form itself. See his "Idealogy of the Text," Salmagundi (Fall 1975/ Winter 1976), pp. 204-46; and "Modernism and Its Repressed: Robbe-Grillet as Anti-Colonialist," Diacritics (Summer 1976), pp. 7-14. 18. The Thomas Mann Reader, edited by Joseph Warner Angell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), p. 502. 19. The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon, 1959), pp. 126-32. 20. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, translated by Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 39-40. 221

Notes, T h e R a i n b o w 3. D. H. LAWRENCE: T H E CYCLE DANCE

1. "Study of Thomas Hardy," Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, 1936, edited by Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking, 197a), p. 403. 2. "What must be broken is the egocentric absolute of the individual," Lawrence said, in recommending group therapy as a necessary corrective to the Freudian analyst/client relationship. It is interesting, in the light of the psychoanalytic emphasis that emerges near the end of this essay, that the participants in this relation themselves habitually perceive it as an analog to the father/child relation. See Lawrence's review of Trigant Burrow's The Social Basis of Consciousness in Phoenix, p. 378. 3. "Study of Thomas Hardy," Phoenix, p. 419. In his cosmos/ character connection, Lawrence leaps across boundaries that seem to be fixed as mutually exclusive in Thomas Mann: Hans Castorp, the self strayed from family into timelessness in The Magic Mountain, is permitted his cosmic epiphanies of sky and snow, whereas such transcendence is denied to the firmly familiar Buddenbrook heroes. 4. "Morality and the Novel," Phoenix, p. 531. Lawrence's assignment of the heterosexual couple as the "dominant dyad" in the family (see Hsu's formulation, p. 60) would cause a symmetrical reversal of the four "dominant attributes" of the dominant father/son dyad: freedom, exclusiveness, discontinuity, and sexuality would all displace their opposites. My conclusions about Lawrence do not refute this prediction of familial dispersal. 5. "The Narrative Technique of The Rainbow," Modern Fiction Studies, 5 (1959), 29-38. 6. "The Two Principles," in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, edited by Warren Roberts and Harry T . Moore (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 227. 7. "Study of Thomas Hardy," Phoenix, p. 449. 8. The Rainbow (New York: Random House, 1943), pp. 38-39. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 9. See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1963), chapter 1. 10. The Deed of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 55. Moynahan is watching Lawrence exercise his pater222

Notes,

Absalom, Absalom!

nal/authorial prerogatives; The rainbow, he affirms, is Lawrence's own "prophetic hope," and not the "ultimate truth of the human condition which the novel narrates." 11. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975)· See especially chapters 2 and 3. 12. "The Novel," Phoenix II, pp. 416-17. Lawrence grounds his description of molestation and authority in the oppositions between Tolstoy's moral philosophy and the effects of the novels he produced. See also Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, in which almost all of the essays turn upon an antagonism between "the teller" (not to be trusted) and "the tale." 13. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 156-85. 14. See The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les mots et les choses), (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1973), pp. 17-777. 15. Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1972), pp. 212-21. Gass's essay, entitled "From Some Ashes No Bird Rises," points to an existential impotence in Lawrence, consequent upon the irresolution of two battling selves within him—a healthy celebrator of life, and the sick deathseeker of the flower-phallus. The argument is not extended in any systematic way to his aesthetic works. 16. Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 65-75. 223-30. 17. "The Two Principles," Phoenix II, p. 227. 4. WILLIAM FAULKNER: " T H E SHADOWY ATTENUATION OF T I M E "

1. Quoted in Faulkner in the University, edited by F. L. Gwynn and J. L. Blotner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959), pp. 71, 73. 2. Ibid., p. 275. 3. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 224-25. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically within the text. 4. See Jean-Paul Sartre, "William Faulkner's Sartoris," translated by Melvin Friedman, Yale French Studies, No. 10 (1952), 223

Notes,

Absalom, Absalom!

pp. 95-99; and "Time in Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury," translated by Martine Darmon, in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, edited by Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga M. Vickery (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), pp. 225-32. 5. "Time on Our Hands," Yale French Studies, No. 10 (1952), P- 76. Myth and Reality, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1963), pp. 5-6, 20-21. 7. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 21. 8. Myth and Reality, p. 18. 9. "The Historical Imagination" in The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), reprinted in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, edited by Hans Meyerhoff (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 72-81. For a strong confirmation of Collingwood's argument, on a firmer philosophical basis, see Lezdek Kolakowski, "Historical Understanding and the Intelligibility of History," TriQuarterly, No. 22 (Fall 1971), pp. 103-17. 10. For the critic-as-detective, see Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 429-36, for an enumeration of the Quentin-Shreve conjectures. See also John Hogan, "Fact and Fancy in Absalom, Absalom!," College English, 24 (December 1962), 215-18. 11. Quoted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 141. This is a reprint of the original 1956 interview with Jean Stein. 12. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1975), p· 15713. Faulkner, the Major Years: A Critical Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 105-106. 14. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, p. 88. 15. The Heidegger texts that extend and magnify my brief appropriation of his thought are readily available in On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper, 1971); and Poetry, Language, and Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), especially "The Origin of the Work of Art." 16. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 49-87. 224

Notes, Ada, or Ardor 17. I am diffusedly indebted here to James Guetti's notion of the "extended simile" in The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 69-108; and to J. Hillis Miller's insights into the radical mimesis of metaphor in "Deconstructing the Deconstructers," Diacritics (Summer 1975), pp. 24-31. 18. Faulkner in the University, p. 32. 5. VLADIMIR NABOKOV: "A COLORED SPIRAL IN A BALL OF GLASS"

1. Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 59. 2. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 3-49. 3. The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 86-111. 4. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Capricorn, 1970), pp. 19-20. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text as SM. 5. Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1972), p. 117. 6. At least two of Nabokov's critics have suggested that his homelessness has added urgency to his search for alternative worlds through art. Alfred Kazin, who himself has experience of being a stranger in a strange land, salutes Nabokov as the "only refugee who could have turned statelessness into absolute strength"; and George Steiner argues that the "extraterritoriality of poets unhoused and wanderers across language" has the positive virtue of leaving the potentialities of language open "within a charged unstable mode of vitality." See Kazin, "Tribute," and Steiner, "Extraterritorial," in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. and Charles Newman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 364-65 and pp. 126-27. 7. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: McGrawHill, 1969), p. 559. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 8. "Pale Fire," Canto 3, 11.807-10, in Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Putnam, Berkeley Medallion, 1968), p. 44. 225

Notes, Ada, or Ardor 9. Quoted in Alfred Appel, Jr., "An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, edited by L. S. Dembo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 43. 10. Nabokov uses the "forking" device extensively in the early novel, The Gift (New York: Putnam, 1963): when Fyodor details his dead father's return (pp. 102 ff.), when he imagines two conversations with the poet Konchyev (pp. 90 ff. and 379 ff.), and when, after having Chernyshevsky hanged and acclaimed a national martyr, he exhumes the martyr to describe his subsequent twenty-five-year exile in Siberia (pp. 314-37). Another writer with a philosophical interest in the forking of time is Jorge Luis Borges (the "Osberg" of Ada). See his Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), especially "The Garden of the Forking Paths," "Avatars of the Tortoise," and "A New Refutation of Time." 11. Levi-Strauss's theory is fully elucidated in the first eight chapters of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, edited by Rodney Needham Bell, translated by John R. Von Sturmer and John Harle Bell (Boston: Beacon, 1969). For a review of the debate about incest among anthropologists and sociologists, see the early chapters of Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Ballantine, 1969)· 12. See Abraham Maslow, "Love in Self-Actualizing People," in Sexuality and Identity, edited by Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (New York: Dell Delta, 1971), pp. 217-40. 13. For the implications of the spiral for the scientist, see Martin Gardner's fascinating The Ambidextrous Universe: Left, Right, and the Fall of Parity (New York: New American, Mentor, 1969). Gardner, an inveterate gamesman, in this book quotes from the poem by "John Francis Shade," and Nabokov returns the compliment by quoting the same verses with an acknowledgement to "an invented philosopher ('Martin Gardiner')." See p. 542 of Ada. For Nabokov's pre-Ada sense of the spiral, see L. L. Lee, "Vladimir Nabokov's Great Spiral of Being," Western Humanities Review, 18 (1964), 225-36; and Carol T. Williams, "Nabokov's Dialectical Structure" in Dembo, The Man and His Work, pp. 165-82. 14. The Gift, p. 269. 15. See Jacques Ehrmann, "Homo Ludens Revisited" in Game, 226

Notes,

Solitude

Play, and Literature, edited by Jacques Ehrmann (Boston: Beacon, 1971), pp. 31-57. (This book was originally the Yale French Studies, No. 41, 1968.) Ehrmann agrees with Johan Huizinga that play is the source of man's highest accomplishments, but he rejects Huizinga's definition of play as sportive and competitive. For a similar critique, see Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 208-46. 16. "The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play," in Ehrmann, Game, Play, and Literature, p. 21. 17. See Michael Holquist, "How to Play Utopia," ibid., pp. 106-23. 18. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 430-39. 19. "How to Compose Chess Problems, and Why" in Ehrmann, Game, Play, and Literature, pp. 68-85. Quotation is from p. 73. 20. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, p. 32.

6. GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: "EVERYTHING IS KNOWN"

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper, 1970), pp. 252-53. The original Spanish edition is Cien anos de soledad (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968). Subsequent references to the translation will appear parenthetically within the text. 2. La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico, D. F.: Editorial Joaquin Mortiz, 1969), p. 9. 3. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohlman, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin American Writers (New York: Harper, ^ 7 ) - PP- 328. 319· 4. Garcia Marquez: Historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971), pp. 20-27, 108-12. 5. Fuentes, La nueva novela, p. 22. 6. "Adam's Alembic or Imagination versus mc 2 ," New Literary History, 1:3 (Spring 1970), 537. 7. Mito y realidad en Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Bogota: Editorial la Oveja Negra, 1970), pp. 28, 41-49. Duque is one of the many Latin American critics who see a parallel between Marquez' Macondo and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. 8. Quoted from Ricardo Gullon, "Gabriel Garcia Marquez

227

Notes,

Solitude

and the Lost Art of Storytelling," Diacritics 1:1 (Fall 1971), 2732. This article generated a series of responses in subsequent issues of the magazine. See R. Gonzalez Echevarria, "With Borges in Macondo," Diacritics 2:1 (Spring 1972), 57-60; see also my "Garcia Marquez and the Genealogical Imperative," and Gonzalez' response, "Big Mama's Wake," Diacritics 4:2 (Summer 1974). 52-57· 9. See Mythical Thought, translated by Ralph Manheim, Vol. II, of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), pp. 29-59. 10. The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 16-23. 11. "The Two Principles of Narrative," translated by Philip E. Lewis, Diacritics 1:1 (Fall 1971), 37-44. One of Todorov's key critical references is to Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, 1958). 12. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See the first two chapters. 13. See C. G. Jung, "The Spirit Mercurius," in Alchemical Studies, translated by R.F.C Hull, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 13 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 191-250. See also Reinhard Federmann, The Royal Art of Alchemy (New York: Chilton, 1969), pp. 2-11. For an argument relating literary and alchemical creation, see Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), chapter 2. 14. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971), chapter 2. 15. See Vargas Llosa, Historia de un deicidio, pp. 545-64. 16. The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins (New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 57 and passim. 17. Steps to An Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), pp· 309-37. 448-66. 18. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov" in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 83-109. Quotation is from p. 89. 228

Notes,

Conclusion

CONCLUSION WHITHER THE NOVEL: T H E WAGER ON SURFACE

i. The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 47. 2. "The Two Principles of Narrative," Diacritics 1:1 (Fall 1971). 37-44· 3. The King's Indian: Stories and Tales (New York: Ballantine, 1976), p. 264. John Gardner is a rich repository of postmodern reflexivity. Here, in the passage that gives this volume its title, he meditates upon the state of consciousness after it has broken through the "artificial wall we build of perceptions and conceptions": "I become a kind of half-wit, a limitless shadow too stupid to work out a mortgage writ, but I am also the path to the stars, rightful monarch of Nowhere. I become, that instant, the King's Indian: Nothing is waste, nothing unfecund. The future is the past, the past is present to my senses. I gaze at the dark Satanic mills, the sludge-thick streams. I shake my head. They vanish" (pp. 259-60). 4. Ibid., p. 325. 5. Hopscotch (Rayuela), translated by Gregory Rabassa.(New York: Pantheon, 1966), p. 84. 6. The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970), P-94· 7. Hopscotch, p. 419. 8. SjZ, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19. 9. 62: A Model Kit, translated by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1972), p. 21. 10. MjF (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 187.

229

Index

affiliation, 71 alchemy, 175-76 allegory, 20iff alliance and descent, 42-43, 161 Alter, Robert, 56η ambivalence, 123-24 "analogical consciousness," 207-208 anonymity, 108-10 Appel, Alfred, Jr., 139η Aries, Phillipe, 12η "aristotelian" languages, 16-17 author: as brother, 210; as deicide, 167; as father, 30, 57-58, 63, 100-101 authority, 12, 48-49, 61-62, 114; and molestation, 99-102; of novelist, 160; of origins, 19; of thought, 101 autobiographical novel, 23-24, 27,56 autobiography, 8, 21-22, 138-39, »45 Backman, Marvin, 123 Bacon, Francis, 19, 21 Barthes, Roland, 17-18, 24, 196, 208 Batailles, Georges, 162, 150η Bateson, Gregory, 189, 48η beginnings, and endings, 31-32, 38-42, 46, 84-85, 96-99, 106, 131, 145-46 Benjamin, Walter, 190-91 Benveniste, Emile, 104-105

Bergonzi, Bernard, 204-205 Bersani, Leo, 40η, 102 Bildungsroman, 5, 59, 82, 145, 197 Borges, Jorge Luis, 146η, 167 both/and, see either/or Brandon, S.G.F., 13η Briffault, Robert, 186 Bronte, Charlotte, 38-39 Brooks, Cleanth, 116η Brown, E. K., 5η Burke, Kenneth, 6, 157 Callahan, John, 13η capitalism, 14-16, 75-76 Carpentier, Alejo, 165 Cassirer, Ernst, 173 Caws, Mary Ann, 176η characterization, 36-37, 50-51, 63-67, 70-72, 188-89 chess problem, 158-61 Church, Margaret, 58η Clarissa Harlowe, 32-33 Coleridge, Samuel, 200, 205 Collingwood, R. G., 116 conservatism, 76-77 consumerism, 211-12 continuity, 24-25, 60-63, 81 coordination, 108, 110-11, 12122, 124

Cortazar, Julio, 203, 207-208 culture, see nature cycle: as regressive, 120-21; dance, 87-88, 94 cyclic structures, 99 231

Index Darwinism, 47-49 Dead Father, The, 194 Dembo, L. S., 139η Descartes, Rene, 19-21 descent, 7, 55, 86-87 detail, liberated, 142-43, 147-49 difference, see sameness differentiation, 40, 103-104 Diggins, John P., 22η Dilthey, Wilhelm, 21-22 Dohlman, Barbara, 166η double helix, 162 dream, Freudian, 210 Drew, Philip, 39η duality, 87-88, 196« Duque, Jaime Mejia, 168-69 dyadic dominance, 60-61 Echevarria, R. Gonzalez, 172η Ehrmann, Jacques, 154η Eiseley, Loren, 35η either/or, and both/and, 4246, 152, 162-63, 176, 207-208 Eliade, Mircea, 113, 115, 122 Eliot, George, 4 endings, see beginnings enumeration, 1788: Erasers, The, 194 eroticism, 41, 74 event: and image, 208-209; vs. scene, g6ff excess, 170 exclusion, 69-70, 73 family, see line of family Fancy, 205-207 fathering as metaphor, 55-57, 109, 122-24

Faulkner, William, 118; Ab­ salom, Absalom!, io8ff; The

Sound and the Fury, 119-21, 124, 131 Federmann, Reinhard, 176η filiation as fusion, 119-20 Filmer, Sir Robert, 10 Fink, Eugen, 155 Forster, E. M., 4-5 Foucault, Michel, 18-19, 104, 178η fragmentation, 42-46, 115 Frank, Joseph, 3 Fuentes, Carlos, 164-67 fusion, 115-20 game: as behavior, 134; of Utopia, 156-57 Gardner, Martin, 154η Gass, William, 104, 136 genealogical imperative, 5ft, 20, 48-49, 168, 174-75 Gentz, Friedrich, 76-77 Giles Goat-Boy, 195, 204 Girard, Rene, 40 Grazia, Sebastian de, 12η Greenfield, June, 15η, 35η Guetti, James, 128η Gullen, Ricardo, 172η Gurvitch, Georges, 75η Harari, Josue\ 34η Harss, Luis, 166η Hart, Francis R., 39 Hayakawa, S. L, 17η Heidegger, Martin, 125-26 Heller, Erich, 62-64 Henderson, Philip, 48η historical: consciousness, 7; method, 38-42; vs. mythic, 38-42, 93, 173, 175, !77, l 8 8 historiography, 8, 21-22 232

Index Hogan, John, 116η Holquist, Michael, 156η Hsu, Francis K., 60-61 Huizinga, Johann, 154η Hutchens, Eleanor H., 5η hyperbole, 180-81 incest, 42-46, 183-84; taboo, 149-51, 160-63 incestuous detail, 149 indeterminacy, 42-46 interpretation, 65, 198-200 Irwin, John T., 120, 125 Jakobson, Roman, 126 James, Henry, 3, 58 Jameson, Frederic, 76η Josipovici, Gabriel, 52η Joyce, James, 27-28, 58 Jung, C. G., 176η Kafka, Franz, 201 Kaufmann, Fritz, 58η Kazin, Alfred, 137η Kermode, Frank, 31, 5η King's Indian, The, 202 Kolakowski, Lezdek, 116η Korzybski, Anton, 16-17 Kuhn, Thomas, 175η Lasch, Christopher, 12η Laslett, Peter, 11, 12η laterality, 73, 83 Lawrence, D. H., 4, 64, 79-80, 100-101; The Rainbow, 8iff; Sons and Lovers, 82; Women in Love, 82, 98 Leavis, F. R., 30 Lee, L. L., 154η legitimacy, 57-58

leitmotif, 74 Lenin, 12 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 149-50, 160-61, 163, 173 Lewis, Wyndham, 27 line: of family, gff, 84, 86; of language, 8, 116-18; of life, 145; of narrative, 2iff, 64-68; of thought, 8, 18-21, 168; of time, i2ff, 35 linearity, and realism, 70 Lubbock, Percy, 3 Lukacs, Georg, 196-97, 5η M/F, 195, 208-209 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 9η Mann, Monika, 57η Mann, Thomas, 81, 166-67; Buddenbrooks, 54ft; Joseph and His Brothers, 77-78; The Magic Mountain, 83η Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: One Hundred Years of Solitude, i64ff Maslow, Abraham, 152η maternal cultures, 186-87 memory, 6, 137, 165!!; and for­ getting, 51-53; loss of, 164; time as, 137-38, 140-41 metaphor: and metonymy, 12630, 174, 208; as coordination, 108, 121-22; as entrapment, 119, 121-22

Meyerhoff, Hans, 5η, 75η Miel, Jean, 5η Miller, J. Hills, 5η, 23-24, 68n, 128η

mimesis, 3-6, 30-31, 56, 70, 16466; as coordination, 108; in Victorian novel, 36-37 233

Index Minkowski, Eugene, 58η Moebius strip, 176s Mumford, Lewis, 13η Mussolini, 12 myth: as coordination, 108; as failure of literature, 131-32; vs. history, 38-42, 93, 173, 175, 177, 188 mythical: consciousness, 173; fusion, 115-19; origins, 11014; time, 112-14

Nabokov, Vladimir: Ada, i33ff; The Gift, 146η, 154η; Pale Fire, 139; Speak, Memory,

Paradiso, 193-94 parody, 133-34 paternity, 110, 183; in Joyce, 27 patriarchy, 10, 186-87 Peckham, Morse, 134 Pierre, 42S Piatt, Gerald, 12η play, 154-55, 170 Poirier, Richard, 135-36 Poulet, Georges, 13η, 35η Propp, Vladimir, 174η prospective, and retrospective, 24. 79 Protestantism, 14-16, 33-36 Proust, Marcel, 55

137-39 narrative, see line of narrative Rader, Ralph, 31 narrator, 23-24, 114-15, 118, Raleigh, John Henry, 13η 171-73, 177 realism, see mimesis nature: and culture, 160-62, recurrence, 12-13, 65, 85-86, 96 165; and man, 184-86 Remembrance of Things Past, Nicholls, Roger Α., 58η Niebuhr, Reinhold, 14 5 »-5« repetition, 40-41, 85-86, 97-98, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52-53 120-21, 127 Nisbet, Robert, 7 retrospective, see prospective nostalgia, 136-37 Ricardou, Jean, 68n novel: as formal construct, 3-5; Robinson Crusoe, 33-34, 24η 18th-century, 30-34; Latin Rosenberg, Harold, 77 American, 166-67, 188-90; nouveau roman, 189-90; tra­ ditional, 4-6, 42, 45, 100, 197- Said, Edward, 5, 99-102 98 sameness, and difference, 18novel, realistic, see mimesis 19, 88, 102-103, 125-30 novelist, see author Sartre, Jean-Paul, 112; Nausea, 78-79 Oedipal triangle, 43-44, 86-87, Schorer, Mark, 3 120-21 secondariness, 77-78 Ortega y Gasset, Josi, 6, 75η self, 81-82, 188 overwriting, and underwriting, self-begetting, 48-51, 83 162 sentence, 17-18, 97-98, 105

234

Index sexuality, 72, 83, 88ff, 95-96,

"strong" and "weak," 93,

103-104

Shorter, Edward, 12η silence, 92-93 simultaneity, 169 Slatoff, Walter, 131 spatial form, 3 Spencer, Sharon, 3 spiral, 153-54 Steiner, George, 137η storyteller, 189-91 storytelling, 78-79 style, as speech, 105 Sunlight Dialogues, The, 193 Sutherland, Donald, 112

time-line, see line of time underwriting, 46, 162 Utopian: games, 156-61; vision, 77 VanGhent, Dorothy, 39 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 166-67, 182 voice: as speech, 105; narra­ tive, 25-26

symbol, 200-201

Tanner, Tony, 135 Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 32-33 Tillich, Paul, 13η time: and space, 3, 139-41; as cycle, 12-13; as interval, 14445; as process, 4-5; Christian, 14; "chronometrical" and "horological," 44-45; He­ brew, 13; incestuous, 46;

Way of All Flesh, The, 46-51 Weinstein, Fred, 11, 12η Weintraub, Karl J., 154η West, Paul, 167 White, Hayden, 21η will, 52-53 willfulness, 102-103 Williams, Carol T., 154η Wimsatt, William K., 7η, 158, i6o Wuthering Heights, 38-42

235

Library of Congress Catologing in Publication Data Tobin, Patricia Drechsel, 1935Time and the novel. Includes index. 1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism 2. Family in literature. I. Title. PN3503.T57 809.3¾ 78-52486 ISBN 0-691-06378-8